Unfinished Revolution

The Early American Republic in a British World

Sam W. Haynes

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780813930800
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

After the War of 1812 the United States remained a cultural and economic satellite of the world's most powerful empire. Though political independence had been won, John Bull intruded upon virtually every aspect of public life, from politics to economic development to literature to the performing arts. Many Americans resented their subordinate role in the transatlantic equation and, as earnest republicans, felt compelled to sever the ties that still connected the two nations. At the same time, the pull of Britain's centripetal orbit remained strong, so that Americans also harbored an unseemly, almost desperate need for validation from the nation that had given rise to their republic.

The tensions inherent in this paradoxical relationship are the focus of Unfinished Revolution. Conflicted and complex, American attitudes toward Great Britain provided a framework through which citizens of the republic developed a clearer sense of their national identity. Moreover, an examination of the transatlantic relationship from an American perspective suggests that the United States may have had more in common with traditional developing nations than we have generally recognized. Writing from the vantage point of America's unrivaled global dominance, historians have tended to see in the young nation the superpower it would become. Haynes here argues that, for all its vaunted claims of distinctiveness and the soaring rhetoric of "manifest destiny, " the young republic exhibited a set of anxieties not uncommon among nation-states that have emerged from long periods of colonial rule.

1

The Axials of Independence

Uncle John call’d aloud for his boys to come home,
“we’ll rest now awhile, and let them alone;
But we will still watch; an eye on them keep,
If we can e’er catch them a dazing in sleep,
We will yet pay them, with interest tenfold,
For their impudence given and haughtiness bold.

—“A Story of Uncle Sam”

The Fourth of July was a noisy affair in every city and town in America during the early decades of the nineteenth century, and nowhere was it more so than in New York City. In 1842, as in years past, the celebration commenced at dawn with an artillery salute on the Battery, at the southern edge of Manhattan Island. For the remainder of the day the air was filled with the sound of squibs and firecrackers, the pealing of church bells, and the celebratory fusillades of militia companies on parade. During the morning hours Gotham’s residents began to congregate along the Battery, where the harbor teemed with vessels of every size and description, all festooned with flags, streamers, and patriotic bunting. By mid-day an immense throng had gathered to watch the festivities, which included the obligatory artillery displays of the city’s harbor defenses. At noon, Castle Williams, the hulking, red-brick fortress on Governor’s Island built to protect the city from the British during the War of 1812, fired its guns to salute the event, a heavy barrage that continued until the fortress was enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke.

As Americans celebrated past conflicts against Great Britain, their present relationship with the island nation was never far from their minds. This was especially true in 1842. Diplomatic relations between the two countries had become strained in recent years over a wide range of territorial and maritime issues. A rebellion in Canada had received the active support of many Americans, prompting angry talk of war on both sides of the Atlantic. But as the nation observed the 66th anniversary of its independence, there was every reason to believe that a rapprochement between the British empire and its former colonies was imminent. Some months earlier, the British government had dispatched a special envoy, Lord Ashburton, to Washington to address long-standing American grievances. By the summer, Ashburton and his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, were said to be on the verge of an historic accord.

With public interest in Ashburton’s mission running high in New York, a city that owed its very existence to the transatlantic trade, the harbor ceremonies honoring the national holiday took on special significance. Lying at anchor a short distance from shore was the HMS Warspite, a fifty gun man-of-war that had ferried Lord Ashburton across the Atlantic on his diplomatic errand and was now waiting to carry the British envoy back to England. With a crew of more than five hundred, the Warspite was a fitting emblem of British sea power. Particularly impressive was its heavy armament, the vessel having recently been outfitted with new, 68-pound Paixhans guns. Revolutionary in design, the Paixhans represented a breakthrough in the development of naval ordnance, firing exploding shells rather than conventional solid-iron shot. A “perfect” fighting ship, enthused one writer for a military magazine, the Warspite “cannot fail to excite the admiration of all persons capable of forming a judgment of what a man-of-war should be.”¹

When the cannonade from Castle Williams subsided, two U.S. warships in the harbor followed with artillery demonstrations of their own. The North Carolina, until recently the flagship of the Pacific fleet and one of the largest ships of the line in the U.S. Navy, delivered a thunderous salute, which was promptly echoed by the frigate Columbia, flagship of the Home Squadron. As a cheer went up from the thousands gathered along the Battery, one thought was on the minds of many in the crowd: would the HMS Warspite follow suit and deign to honor the United States on the anniversary of its independence from Great Britain? When at last the report of the Columbia’s guns faded, a quiet fell upon the harbor, and all eyes along the Battery turned to the Warspite. The British man-of-war remained eerily silent, with no sign of activity on its decks, some distance from shore.

“The Britisher’s out of gunpowder,” cried one wag in the crowd. No sooner had he uttered the remark than a sudden flash appeared from the side of the British frigate, followed by a wisp of smoke. The boom of the heavy brass gun reverberated across the water, and in a moment a mighty crash, painful to the ear, reached the onlookers along the Battery. Again and again the Warspite’s guns fired, rattling the window panes of the buildings facing the harbor in a deafening barrage that made the American ships’ cannons sound, according to one Scottish tourist, like “popguns.” The cannonade caused surprise and no little consternation to some in the crowd. Though clearly intended as a gesture of respect to the Americans and their national holiday, it left many onlookers “causelessly annoyed” that their own vessels had been outdone in so public a manner by a British ship of the line.²

This trivial moment in U.S.-British relations encapsulates the complex and often contradictory manner in which Americans regarded the nation that had given birth to their republic. No other people in the western hemisphere who had broken free of European colonialism celebrated their independence with such flamboyant enthusiasm. Yet none remained so connected to the imperial parent. John Bull still loomed large in the public consciousness, bound to his former colonies by ties of kinship, culture, and commerce. As a result, Americans remained inordinately sensitive to the opinion of Great Britain, “the only country,” wrote one editorialist, “for whose respect we really care a straw.”³

And therein lay a dilemma for American patriots. Though keen for their country to be regarded as Britain’s equal, they sensed, for all their bravado, that this was a distinction that was not theirs to bestow. Instinctively, they sought validation from the highest possible authority, from Britain itself. Yet the very act of doing so offered compelling evidence that the United States remained very much the junior partner in this transatlantic relationship. In exhibiting a yearning for British approval, Americans revealed their own doubts about the country’s stature on the world stage. Thus, on July 4th, the residents of Gotham, and by extension the nation at large, waited in eager anticipation for the British vessel’s congratulatory cannonade. But when it finally came, it did little to allay American insecurities. Rather, the Warspite’s salute served as a blunt reminder that the republic still stood in the shadow of Great Britain, and would continue to do so for some time to come.

“Conflicting Sensations” and the National Sense of Self

This study in Anglophone transatlantic relations begins in 1815, a year that Americans have traditionally regarded as a watershed moment in the history of their republic. The War of 1812, a war that seemed to mark the final chapter in the struggle for independence, had ended. The second conflict with Great Britain had been fraught with embarrassments, the burning of the nation’s capital notably among them. Nonetheless, in the minds of many Americans, Andrew Jackson’s spectacular victory at New Orleans had done much to wipe this stain from the national escutcheon, allowing them to claim that they had bested the armies that had defeated Napoleon. The utter rout of British troops on the plains of Chalmette had also laid to rest, at long last, fears of foreign invasion. Peace would bring a new sense of territorial security, which would in turn help to whet American expansionist appetites. Although the Treaty of Ghent had achieved little of substance, the agreement signaled the end of an historic British-Indian alliance in the Ohio River Valley that for years had impeded westward-moving whites. A veritable land rush followed, resulting in the admission of five new transmontane states during the period 1816–21. Meanwhile, the slow disintegration of Spain’s colonial empire in the Americas would soon bring Florida under Washington’s aegis and create a power vacuum in the Southwest that betokened further territorial acquisitions. In the years after 1815, then, it seemed as if the United States had at last managed to detach itself from its Atlantic moorings. The nation’s center of gravity now shifted, as American citizens turned their gaze westward, eager to test the limits of the national domain.⁴

Republican pundits saw in these auguries a great nation on the rise, and they delighted in saying so, loudly and often. Never reluctant to exhibit their patriotic bona fides in the years prior to the war, they made nothing less than a cult of national devotion in the years afterward. All manner of civic discourse—from the public prints to the pulpit, on the campaign stump and national holiday orations—took up the theme of amor patriae. Citizens of the republic became enthralled as never before by the iconography of nationhood, viewing the eagle and the flag as sacred objects. These emblems were not only on prominent display on the Fourth of July, but could be seen adorning public buildings, hotels, theaters, and private homes throughout the year. “You see the ‘star spangled banner’ every where, even on the lowest pot-houses,” observed one British traveler.⁵ Americans covered their walls with engravings, woodcuts, and paintings of military engagements, while even “the panels of some of their stage-coaches are ornamented with representations of their frigates capturing their British antagonists,” as one visitor noted. Not satisfied with the observance of a single national holiday, Americans found many opportunities to commemorate the recent past with banquets, parades, patriotic oratory, pyrotechnics, cannonade, and fireworks displays. Washington’s birthday was observed in similar fashion, while communities throughout the United States celebrated annually their own contributions in the struggle for independence. The proliferation of these events was accompanied by a monument-building mania, with communities taking up subscriptions to erect tributes to local military heroes. From one end of the country to the other, Americans sang the praises of the young republic, creating a nationwide echo chamber of self-congratulation that would reach a climactic crescendo with the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1826.⁶

Initially, these rituals of national belonging were not seen as an excuse to dredge up old animosities. On the contrary, Americans in the immediate postwar years seemed to have made their peace with Great Britain. Community leaders entrusted with the task of interpreting the nation’s creation narrative on these holidays rarely used the occasion to engender popular enmity toward the British. Their declamations were often generic homilies on the meaning of a republic, paeans to the feats of military heroes, replete with exhortations to never forget those whose sacrifices had helped forge a nation. At Fourth of July gatherings and other public meetings, orators might just as often expound upon the kindred ties between Great Britain and the United States as dwell on the bitter memories of war. Britain’s minister to Washington encountered no explicit anti-British feeling during the visit of the Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, who toured the country in 1825, or during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations the following year.⁷ Indeed, some Independence Day orators in 1826 took pains to reflect on the connections that bound the two peoples, expressing a willingness to let bygones be bygones: “Oh, England, how many sublime and tender associations gather around thy name!” North Carolina politician Robert Strange declared. Though the republic had been spurned and abused by the mother country, he continued, “the filial affections of America still cling to thee with ardor.”⁸

Yet these attachments were not nearly as firm as Strange would have his audience believe. The transatlantic relationship had always been a volatile one, and James Fenimore Cooper was a good deal closer to the mark when he observed that Americans regarded Great Britain with “conflicting sensations,” an ambivalence that weighed the two countries’ many commonalities against their many differences. Anti-British feeling may have subsided after 1815, but it would soon reemerge, and by the second quarter of the nineteenth century some observers believed that the mood of the country was decidedly more hostile to Great Britain than it had been during the war. British visitors did not fail to notice the change in tone. By the Jacksonian period, they complained, the oratory of national holidays had become little more than an “opportunity for vituperation” of their country. This was certainly an exaggeration, but there can be little doubt that a shift in public opinion was under way. American political leaders both exploited and fed these feelings. Bearding the British lion would become a conspicuous feature of the rhetoric of both parties during this period, with one British diplomat asserting that members of Congress considered it “anti-American” to speak favorably of England. The travel writer Basil Hall was so amused by the anti-British screeds he witnessed from the Capitol galleries that he wondered if there was a House rule that required members “to take a passing fling at the poor Old Country” at least once every speech.⁹

This gradual swelling of anti-British sentiment had many sources. For one thing, Americans by the mid-1820s were becoming more than a little irritated by the tone of haughty condescension that British observers saw fit to adopt when writing of the former colonies. In periodicals and scores of travel books, British authors derided the republic as a nation of money-grubbing, tobacco-chewing rubes, insults that hurt Americans all the more because they traditionally held the opinions of the British intellectual community in such high regard. Meanwhile, Britain’s vast industrial and financial power stoked American economic anxieties. Residents of manufacturing states clamored for tariff protection from cheap British imports, while others saw a greater evil in the vast web of transatlantic financial connections that left the republic deeply in debt to London banking houses. Southern slaveholders, moreover, regarded with unmixed horror that country’s leadership role in the crusade to eradicate slavery in the western hemisphere. Territorial issues, too, were cause for concern. By the 1840s, boundary disputes in Maine and Oregon brought the two nations dangerously close to war, while a conspicuous British presence in Texas and Mexico prompted fears that the empire might block U.S. territorial ambitions in the West.

American fears of British hegemony were not entirely without foundation. Enjoying an unrivalled position of economic and geopolitical power similar to that exercised in the next century by the United States, Great Britain emerged after the fall of Napoleon as a globe-girding colossus whose reach extended far beyond its territorial dominions. Still, citizens of the American republic tended to exaggerate the threat from abroad. Much like other peoples in the developing world who have feared foreign domination, they ascribed to the imperial power an omnipotence it did not possess. It was widely believed that Britain, having failed to subdue its wayward North American colonies by force of arms, would now seek to accomplish the same object by indirect means. The belief that the danger from Great Britain would henceforth appear in veiled form only made it more menacing for many conspiratorially minded Americans. Allowing their imaginations free rein, Anglophobes espied an evil empire of Mephistophelean dimensions, convinced that Whitehall was secretly marshalling the full resources of British power in a vast, insidious campaign against them. John Bull seemed to be “here, there, and everywhere, plotting mischief and injury,” one British visitor observed. He added, archly: “If money is scarce, it is England that has occasioned it—if credit is bad, it is England—if eggs are not fresh or beef is tough, it is, it must be, England.”¹⁰

Even when Americans quarreled among themselves, they found it difficult to set aside their deeply rooted suspicions of the nation’s traditional adversary. By the mid-1820s, the Jeffersonian consensus had disintegrated, as an increasingly uncertain and volatile marketplace produced a bitter national debate over federal economic policy. Urban growing pains brought class and ethnic tensions suddenly to the fore in the Mid-Atlantic states. Most ominously of all, the early rumblings of antislavery sentiment in the North were beginning to reveal the fault lines of a regional divide that would grow ever wider in the years ahead. To a more secure nation, these developments would have been seen as domestic problems only, with little connection to the world beyond its borders. But Americans still regarded Great Britain as an imperial hegemon bent on their demise, and consequently looked for an overseas connection whenever internal crises arose. Rare was the political controversy which was not accompanied by charges of “foreign influence.” Leaders of varying partisan hues accused parliamentary cabals of rigging elections and disseminating propaganda to subvert American institutions. When faced with unsatisfactory political outcomes, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Axials of Independence
• 2. ‘What Do You Think of Our Country?’
• 3. “Who Reads an American Book?’
• 4. “America Rules England Tonight, by Jesus”
• 5. The Politics of Anglophobia
• 6. “Politically Free, Commercial Slaves”
• 7. The Money Power of England
• 8. “An Army of Fanatics”
• 9. Breaking the “Iron Hoop”
• 10. The Texas Question
• 11. “Looking John Bull Straight in the Eye”
• 12. “Brother Jonathan Is Somebody”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index