The American Revolution

New Nation as New Empire

Neil L. York

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317559030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In The American Revolution, 1760 to 1790: New Nation as New Empire, Neil York details the important and complex events that transpired during the creation of the enduring American Republic. This text presents a global look at the emerging nation's quest to balance liberty and authority before, during, and after the conflict with Great Britain, from the fall of Montreal through the Nootka Sound controversy. Through reviewing the causes and consequences of the Revolutionary era, York uncovers the period's paradoxes in an accessible, introductory text.

Taking an international perspective which closely examines the diplomatic and military elements of this period, this volume includes:

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• Detailed maps of the Colonies, with important battle scenes highlighted

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• Suggestions for further reading, allowing for more specialized research

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• Comprehensive international context, providing background to Great Britain's relations with other European powers

Brief in length but broad in scope, York's text provides the ideal introductory volume to the Revolutionary War as well as the creation of American democracy.

Part I Empire as Nation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315733791-2

Map 1 North America and the West Indies ca. 1763. Map by Alice Thiede, CARTO-GRAPHICS

Chapter 1 Imperial Dreams, Colonial Realities

DOI: 10.4324/9781315733791-3

Britain Triumphant

Montreal fell to the British in September 1760 and with it went France’s empire in North America. Its surrender had been predicted by those closest to the fighting but the event itself had actually been a near thing. Less than six months before the French had launched a campaign to retake Quebec, which had been surrendered to the British the previous year. A British fleet with reinforcements made it to Quebec just in time; British naval superiority prevented the French from doing the same. The French retreated back toward Montreal to await what now appeared to have become inevitable.

An Anglo-American land and naval force of well over fifteen thousand, advancing in three columns, converged on the city; it would be given up without much of a fight. The French had been outnumbered at better than three to one, with no hope of relief. Anticipating defeat and not relishing being caught in a siege, New France’s Indian allies drifted away as the British came closer. Some may have switched sides to join the natives already allied with the British. Even the local militia proved reluctant to muster forth and defend Montreal to the last. Major General Jeffrey Amherst had mounted a well-coordinated campaign, as British regulars, colonial American militia, and Indian warriors combined their efforts. Even though they did not mesh together perfectly as some sort of well-oiled military machine, gone were the earlier days of humiliation, marked especially by General Edward Braddock’s defeat in 1755. Then, British regulars had been slaughtered by an unseen enemy in the Pennsylvania woods. What happened to Braddock proved to be an anomaly; British regulars were crucial to the eventual Anglo-American victory. Red regimental coats or tartan kilts did not have to be cast aside in order to fight successfully in North America.

As so often happens in the ironies of life, the satisfying short-term outcome also had its less satisfying long-term effect. We can now see that victory sowed with it the seeds of defeat. What is hindsight for us was foresight for others. That there was a potentially dangerous dynamic at work in the British empire had been noticed by two men thousands of miles away from Montreal. One was English, the other French; neither would ever set foot on American soil. Both were in Constantinople, friends despite being on different sides in this most recent war. The Frenchman commented—his ironic intent transparent—that France ought to be heartened and the British chastened. With the French driven out of North America, Britons and Americans would find themselves turning on each other, one-time allies becoming enemies. Why? Because Americans would be called on by Britons to help share the greater financial burdens brought by a larger empire. But they, the Frenchman predicted, “will answer you by shaking off all dependence.” The Englishman, John Lind, would, during that future conflict, write in defense of Britain’s imperial policy and against the American response to it. The Frenchman, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, as France’s wartime foreign minister would be in a position to turn his prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Anglo-French struggle for overseas empire that took Amherst’s juggernaut to the gates of Montreal had begun roughly seventy years before. Competition between England and France for empire closer to home dated back centuries rather than decades, long before either nation looked toward the Atlantic horizon. The Great Britain that would come to define itself by overseas empire had once been an England with far more modest ambitions, as it attempted to secure its place in the home islands and hold on to tenuous claims in France. English interest in overseas empire did not lead immediately to the New World. Likewise, English interest in New World commercial wealth did not lead immediately to the planting of colonies there. And for much of colonial American history, what had been settled on the mainland mattered less to Britain’s imperially minded than what had developed in the West Indies.

Imperial England

For those on the island of Great Britain who preferred tribal living and local control, the creation of England itself was a type of imperialism. England’s Angevin empire, an eventual by-product of the Norman invasion in the eleventh century, was more self-consciously ambitious than empires that had gone before. But the Anglo-Saxons who resented those Normans—as they had resented the Danes who invaded just a generation before—had earlier subjugated ancient Britons. Those ancient Britons no doubt resented them, as those Britons had resented the Romans who beat them into submission centuries earlier. England, then, long before it became Great Britain with the Scottish parliamentary union in 1707, had been formed by a concentration of authority and power—celebrated by some, denigrated by others.

With good reason did historian Hugh Kearney advise us to take a “Britannic approach” to studying the land and people of those isles, at least into the sixteenth century. Thinking only within the boundaries that would someday mark England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland eliminates important nuances. Differences that divided people under the same rulers or cultural connections that transcended feudal borders can be lost if studies begin with the nation state in embryo. Kearney noted that there is a tendency to “domesticate the Norman Conquest” of 1066, as if there was something foreordained about what followed, a playing out of a time-honored tale that takes us sequentially from Saxon England to Norman England to the England of the Tudors and then the England that gave us Virginia.

To think of the emergence of England as a product of conquest and colonization within the British Isles can better help us understand the forces at work when England moved beyond those island realms, and beyond a France that English kings, beginning with Edward III in the fourteenth century, claimed as rightfully theirs. Historians have long commented that the notions of cultural, even racial, superiority that Anglo-Normans, and later the English, took with them to Celtic Ireland, settlers carried across the Atlantic as well. Native Americans would suffer the consequences. But with Kearney’s caution in mind, we should also remember that those attitudes had been part of England’s dealings with Wales and Scotland as well as Ireland—even as England itself was developing its own identity. Attachment to an idealized England composed of a single, homogenous people was an ideological construct. It was necessary for the development of what French sociologist Émile Durkheim called the “collective consciousness” behind national identity, but a construct nonetheless. England was born in a belief system that acted as the foundation for an eventual worldwide empire that needed to think of itself as an organic community of interests, even a family of mother country and children colonies: English nation as precursor to British empire. But within that British empire the English would maintain a self-conscious cultural core. The sense of manifest destiny and mission that would someday drive Americans to strike out on their own was a direct outgrowth of England’s earlier expansion that had joined nation and empire. Likewise for the American identity behind it, which retained much about it that was English.

Overseas Empire

“Commerce follows the flag” proclaimed Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in his 1895 defense of American expansionism. He advocated a vigorous American foreign policy in neighboring lands—neighboring lands that extended to Hawaii as an essential “outwork” of the American “citadel.” Critics of Lodge’s jingoism would point out that, more often than not, the flag actually follows commerce—the national public interest abroad being defined by the trail carved or wake cut by private enterprise that ventured forth first. British imperial historian P. J. Marshall offered a variation on that distinction when he differentiated between British “expansion” and the British “empire.” The private enterprise of the former tended to precede the public policy of the latter and define the priorities set by those charged with imperial administration. Expansion existed apart from empire and yet they were “closely linked and mutually dependent,” as Professor Marshall put it. The movement of Americans beyond their borders once they achieved political independence mimicked the tendencies of Britons begun nearly two centuries before: exploration of new worlds, the out-migration of settlers, uneasy relations often leading to clashes between indigenous peoples and transplanted Europeans, the development of trade ties between homeland and new colonies, subsequent economic and social transformations, the building of political communities, and the intellectual apparatus that would underpin it all, but much of it rather loose knit if not haphazard as it unfolded.

Reconceptualizing the ocean as a barrier into the ocean as a highway may have been the most fundamental discovery of the so-called Age of Discovery. England became an essential part of this reconfiguration, as were Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands before it, and France at roughly the same time. They pioneered what later scholars would call the world economic system, which became the foundation of our modern interconnected lives. Tentative transoceanic travel evolved into a constant flow of peoples, goods, and ideas around the globe.

The nation state as it emerged in western Europe stood at the core of this enterprise. Creating worldwide markets boosted capitalist enterprise, with the accumulation of wealth and concentration of power. Setting up trading outposts in one part of the world and encouraging the growth of settler colonies in another transformed the nations that led the way and the native societies drawn into their orbits. Questions of national identity and state sovereignty, already complicated, became even more complex with the drawing together of peoples and cultures that had once existed in relative isolation from each other. Even though the Atlantic world of 1776 was essentially pre-industrial, there had been a proliferation of goods and growth of consumer culture that gave an increasingly materialistic tinge to what constituted the good life, and the expectations of those living in colonies who nonetheless expected to share its blessings.

When John Cabot set forth from England in 1497 so that the island nation could claim a share of whatever it was Columbus had found to the west in a search for the East, he sailed into an Atlantic that Spain and Portugal had already divided between them. They did so with papal sanction, the Vatican continuing its century-old practice of mediating disputes between rival European states over Atlantic islands. The most sweeping of those papal decrees came in 1493, in direct response to Columbus’s first voyage. The Spanish and Portuguese followed it the next year with the now famous Treaty of Tordesillas. Bisecting the Atlantic, all pagan lands to the west of the line were left open to Spain; those to the south and east were deemed within Portugal’s sphere. Any other Christian nation venturing into those climes did so as an interloper, interfering with the building of God’s kingdom on Earth.

Portugal and Spain began a shift in wealth and power in Europe, as the trade domination of Italian city states in the Mediterranean and the Hanse in the Baltic would be eclipsed by Atlantic enterprise. Portugal had extended its reach as far as the Azores by the 1440s and to various island groups off Africa as well as to the coast of Africa itself. Spain came close on its heels; England lagged far behind. All would mix public policy with private enterprise because none of these nation states had the wherewithal to pursue transoceanic empire. They had to expand on the cheap, which meant they had had no choice but to build a potential conflict of interests into their overseas efforts. Threats to their security or stability would eventually come from disagreements within as well as rivals without.

Spain would unsuccessfully attempt to use its papally endorsed treaties with Portugal to keep competitors like England out of its New World enterprises. The presumed right of discovery that lay at the heart of the Spanish enterprise would be adopted and then modified by the English. Potential confrontation between these rivals did not automatically produce open conflict. Spain realized, as the decades passed, that it could not make good on all of its New World claims. It finally grudgingly accepted the reality of English America when, in 1670, it recognized the legitimacy of the Carolina colony to the north of St. Augustine. Still, it did not accept Carolina’s western and southern boundary claims. Spain had over twenty years before it recognized Dutch independence and, with it, the right of the Dutch to trade in areas of the world that, according to Spain’s 1494 arrangement with Portugal, was forbidden. In abandoning the fiction of that monopoly, Spain accepted changes in both the Old World and the New that it could not prevent. The demands of “realpolitik,” it learned, could only be resisted for so long. Like the French and the English as well as the Dutch, the Spanish adjusted their diplomatic and military responses to the needs of the moment.

The long dreamt-of China trade that had prompted Spain to back Columbus also proved alluring to the English. Those wanting to develop the western route overseas vied with those interested in pressing east through the interior of Asia. The Muscovy Company concentrated on exploring the far north to find a great river that could take merchants deep inland, perhaps to China itself. The Levant Company concentrated on the eastern Mediterranean as the starting point for its overland trade to the east. Although it did not prosper, some of its investors shifted their emphasis to the newly founded East India Company in 1600, which for nearly three centuries would be the face of Britain’s empire on the Indian subcontinent. The motto “Deus Indicat” inscribed on the East India Company’s coat of arms captured the sentiments of these enterprises and others coming after: that God led them in their efforts, that England’s empire was somehow also His, its success a reflection of His will. All of these joint stock companies were founded after England’s early enthusiasm for New World adventure had waned. That enthusiasm was preserved on a small scale among the “Sea Dogs” like John Hawkins and Francis Drake—and of course those who had long been fishing for cod off the Grand Banks but who showed little interest in colony-planting schemes.

Once the English did develop a sustained interest in the New World, the most far-sighted among them envisioned a European balance of power remade because of it. Henry VII had expected Cabot to avoid direct confrontation with the Spanish over territorial claims. So were his successors for generations to come, until the migratory trickle became an irresistible flood. Richard Hakluyt captured England’s transatlantic imperial vision perfectly in his 1584 “Discourse” on western planting. A tract seen only by a few in Hakluyt’s lifetime, it nevertheless captured the ambitions of that generation, ambitions that would be recognizable even centuries later. Hakluyt’s ideas were to be absorbed within a historical understanding that embraced the notion of American exceptionalism—that here was a unique land of opportunity awaiting a dynamic people to exploit it. Reviewing tales of pre-Columbian voyages to America by Britons, Hakluyt emphasized effective occupation over prior discovery when it came to claiming rights over new lands and peoples. That view defined the approach England took over the centuries as it transformed itself and the native peoples it drew within its global sphere. Americans would someday echo it when they had an expansive nation of their own.

Hakluyt, an Anglican priest, talked of a religious transformation. Pagans in the New World would be brought to God through English colonization and the religiously oppressed in Europe would have a new haven. Since Hakluyt lived in post-Reformation England, he had in mind an Anglican, not a Catholic, God at the center of English-American life. That Hakluyt may have been culturally blind, his idea of liberation striking many indigenous peoples as subjugation, did not make him insincere.

Hakluyt emphasized that England’s poor could make a new start in that New World. They would plant the crops, raise the livestock, and transfer the industries enabling England, through its overseas empire, to become more self-sufficient. Ideally it would develop a virtually self-contained economy with no need to trade outside its own transoceanic nexus. Even the Spanish—ahead of them in the overseas game at the moment—would someday turn to them for desirable goods. Moreover, the English-American producer would also be a consumer, helping to stimulate the economy back home. Indeed, England could convert transatlantic trade domination into European political power, using the marketplace as a profitable and yet bloodless scene of competition.

In Hakluyt’s trickle-down theory of imperial prosperity, all who were part of the enterprise would benefit. It is no surprise, then, that colonial Americans became attached to the idea of the good life, a hope that hard work would bring comfort and security, even wealth and status. With time they would gauge the success of the larger empire by how well it helped them realize their own dreams of prosperity.

Hakluyt anticipated a robust shipbuilding industry in English America and he was convinced that crossings there and back would be safer, speedier, and more reliable than the longer voyages to India and the Far East. England could free itself of a growing dependence on the Baltic states and ease pressures on its own shrinking raw materials for a blue water navy: oak for hulls and decks; pine for masts and spars; pitch, tar, and hemp for caulking and rigging. Hakluyt saw a future where the small vessels of his era would be replaced by massive merchantmen. Their holds would carry the wealth of empire and their decks would mount cannons to defend it. Hakluyt can be forgiven for not foreseeing the coming specialization in naval architecture, with a privately owned merchant marine that would be protected by a Royal Navy that carried guns, not goods. He did foresee that, with all of the private wealth indirectly benefiting the English crown by enriching the nation, there would also be a need to fill public coffers by taxing trade—not just articles carried by European rivals, but goods carried by the English and their American colonists. Cabot had only been expected to share with the Crown a percentage of the gold, silver and other precious metals he brought out of the New World. By Hakluyt’s day all goods produced in the overseas empire could in theory be taxed, though Hakluyt and his contemporaries were far from working out the details of what would become known as the navigation system.

England’s champions of overseas empire were all mercantilists who emphasized subordinating private enrichment to public security. According to this theory, bullion should flow into, not out of, the empire, as part of a favorable balance of trade where exports exceeded imports. But attachment to mercantilistic notions did not bring with it a prescribed set of policies. Any limitation on the flow of trade to constrain wealth was bound to provoke opposition, as the crown, privy council and parliament attempted to balance rival commercial interests within the empire. Placating producers could be as difficult as satisfying consumers. Attempts to monopolize trade brought automatic resistance and smuggling became a transoceanic way of life, proof that imperial ideal and colonial reality could be at odds. Ultimately, disputes over trade policies could lead to disputes over political rights.

Not all parts of the empire were equal. London responded more readily to the needs of some overseas enterprises than others. The expectations of American colonists had to be weighed against the needs of others. Sometimes the resulting trade policies worked to their advantage; sometimes they did not. Many of the issues associated with the trade policies leading to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 had been anticipated a century and a half before. Then the commodity concerned was tobacco rather than tea. Tobacco growers in Virginia wanted open access to markets and resented having to ship their leaf to England first before being able to sell on the continent. They also wanted a monopoly that would keep English planters from growing their own crop and Dutch or Spanish vessels from delivering tobacco originating elsewhere. London was only willing to go so far to accommodate them. Ironically, by the Revolutionary Era tobacco prices had dropped as the market became glutted, a problem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prologue
• Part I Empire as Nation
• Part II World War
• Part III Nation as Empire
• Epilogue
• Further Reading
• Index