Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (18 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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It took just over a year after the first shots at Lexington for rebellion to turn into outright revolution. On 4 July 1776, in the austere chamber normally used by the Pennsylvania assembly, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by representatives of the thirteen secessionist colonies at the Second Continental Congress. Only two years before, its principal author, the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson, had still addressed George III in the name of ‘your subjects in British America’. Now the transatlantic or ‘continental’ Britons had become American ‘Patriots’. In fact, most of the Declaration is a rather tedious and overstated list of wrongs supposedly inflicted on the colonists by the King, whom they accused of trying to erect a ‘Tyranny over these States’. It bears all the hallmarks of a document heavily revised by an outsize committee. It is Jefferson’s preamble that people remember today: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
Nowadays that sounds about as revolutionary as motherhood and apple pie. But at the time it was an explosive challenge not just to royal authority but to the traditional values of a hierarchical, Christian society. Before 1776 the debate about the colonies’ future had very largely been couched in terms familiar from the British constitutional wrangles of the previous century. With the publication of Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
in 1776, however, an entirely new idea had entered the political debate, and with breathtaking speed carried the day: anti-monarchism, with the strong implication of republicanism. Of course, a republic was nothing new. The Venetians, the Hanseatic Germans, the Swiss and the Dutch all had them; indeed, the British themselves had conducted their own brief experiment with republicanism in the 1650s. But Jefferson’s preamble ensured that the American republic would be fashioned in the terms of the Enlightenment: in terms of natural rights – above all the right of every individual ‘to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom’.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Declaration of Independence was that the representatives of all thirteen colonies were able to sign it. Just over twenty years before, the divisions between them had seemed so wide that Charles Townshend had found it ‘impossible to imagine that so many different representatives of so many different provinces, divided in interest and alienated by jealousy and inveterate prejudice, should ever be able to resolve upon a plan of mutual security and reciprocal expense’. Even Benjamin Franklin had admitted that the colonies had
different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners. Their jealousy of each other is so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves.
 
The Declaration was intended to end these divisions. It even coined the name ‘United States’. But its consequences were to prove deeply divisive. Jefferson’s revolutionary language alienated many more conservative colonists. A surprisingly large number of them turned out to be ready to fight for King and Empire. When Dr James Thatcher resolved to join the Patriots, he found that his friends
afford[ed] me no encouragement, alleging that, as this is a civil war, if I should fall into the hands of the British the gallows will be my fate ... The Tories assail[ed] me with the following: ‘Young man, are you sensible you are about to violate your duty to the best of kings, and run headlong into destruction? Be assured that this rebellion will be of short duration’.
 
The Hollywood version of the War of Independence is a straightforward fight between heroic Patriots and wicked, Nazi-like Redcoats. The reality was quite different. This was indeed a civil war which divided social classes and even families. And the worst of the violence did not involve regular British troops, but was perpetrated by rebel colonists against their countrymen who remained loyal to the crown.
Take the case of Christ Church in Philadelphia, often thought of as a hotbed of revolution because several of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence worshipped there. In fact, supporters of independence were in the minority of the congregation. Only around a third supported independence; the rest were either against or were neutral. Christ Church, like countless others in colonial America, was a church divided by politics. Nor was it only congregations that were divided; whole families were split asunder by the War of Independence. The Franklin family were regular attenders at Christ Church, so much so that they had their own pew. Benjamin Franklin spent nearly a decade vainly arguing the colonists’ case in London before returning to join the Continental Congress and the fight for independence. But his son William, governor of New Jersey, remained loyal to the crown during the war. The two never spoke again.
The pressure on clergymen was particularly acute, since ministers owed their allegiance to the King as head of the Church of England. As Rector of Christ Church, Jacob Duché was torn between loyalty to the Anglican establishment and sympathy for those of his flock who supported the revolution. His own copy of the Book of Common Prayer testifies to the extent of his support for independence. What the Prayer Book originally says is: ‘We humbly beseech Thee so to dispose and govern the heart of George thy Servant our king and governor ...’ (meaning George III). But Duché took a pen and struck those words out, replacing them with: ‘We humbly beseech Thee so to direct the rulers of these United States ...’ This was without question a revolutionary act. And yet when independence was formally declared, despite the fact that one of the signatories was Duché’s own brother-in-law, he got cold feet, returned to the Anglican fold and became a Loyalist. Duché’s dilemma illustrates how the American Revolution could divide even individuals. Nor was it only Anglicans who rejected rebellion on religious grounds. The Sandemanians of Connecticut remained loyal because they believed unconditionally that a Christian should be a ‘loyal Subject, submitting himself in civil Concerns to every Ordinance of Man for the Lord’s Sake’.
Overall, something like one in five of the white population of British North America remained loyal to the crown during the war. Indeed, the Loyalist companies often fought far more tenaciously than Britain’s hesitant generals. There were even Loyalist songs, like ‘The Congress’:
These hardy knaves and stupid fools,
Some apish and pragmatic mules,
Some servile acquiescing tools,
These, these compose the Congress.
 
 
Then Jove resolved to send a curse,
And all the woes of life rehearse
Not plague, not famine, but much worse
He cursed us with a Congress.
 
Then peace forsook this hopeless shore
Then cannons blazed with horrid roar
We hear of blood, death, wounds and gore,
The offspring of the Congress.
In such polemics the two sides routinely labelled one another ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’. This really was the second British – or perhaps the first American – Civil War.
One Loyalist who fought in the Carolinas, the bald-headed backwoodsman David Fanning, wrote a gripping account of his wartime experiences. According to one version of Fanning’s story, it was after his pack train was pillaged by rebel militia in 1775 that he ‘signed in favour of the King’, though it seems more probable that the whole area where Fanning lived remained loyal. For six years, he was involved in sporadic guerrilla warfare in North Carolina, collecting two bullets in his back and a price on his head in the process. On 12 September 1781 he struck a major blow for the Empire when he and his Loyalist followers, supported by a detachment of British regulars, emerged out of a foggy dawn to capture the town of Hillsborough and with it the entire North Carolina General Assembly, the state’s rebel governor and numerous officers of the Patriot army. In the wake of this success, the Loyalist ranks in North Carolina swelled to more than 1,200. There were similar Loyalist forces as far afield as New York, East Florida, Savannah, Georgia, and Daufuskie Island in South Carolina.
The possibility clearly existed for closer cooperation between forces like Fanning’s irregular militias and the regular redcoat armies. Yet for two reasons this was a war Britain simply could not win. For one thing, the transatlantic civil war quickly became absorbed into the long-running global struggle between Britain and France. Here was Louis XVI’s chance to take revenge for the Seven Years War, and he seized it with relish. This time Britain had no continental allies to tie down France – not to mention her ally Spain – in Europe. Under these circumstances, a full-scale campaign in America would have been hazardous in the extreme.
In any case, and just as importantly, many people back home sympathized with the colonists. Samuel Johnson was quite unusual in his splenetic hostility towards them (‘I am willing to love all mankind, except an American ... Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging’). Indeed, the sheer number of violent arguments he had on the subject, many recorded by his biographer and friend James Boswell, confirms that Johnson was in a minority. Boswell himself had formed ‘a clear and settled opinion, that the people of America were well warranted to resist a claim that their fellow-subjects in the mother-country should have the entire command of their fortunes, by taxing them without their own consent’. Many leading Whig politicians took the same view. In Parliament the flamboyant Whig leader Charles James Fox paraded his American sympathies by appearing in the buff and blue colours of Washington’s Patriot army. Edmund Burke spoke for many when he declared: ‘The use of force alone ... may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered’. In short, London lacked the stomach to impose British rule on white colonists who were determined to resist it. It was one thing to fight native Americans or mutinous slaves, but it was another to fight what amounted to your own people. As Sir Guy Carlton, the British Governor of Quebec said when justifying his lenient treatment of some Patriot prisoners: ‘Since we have tried in vain to make them acknowledge us as brothers, let us at least send them away disposed to regard us as first cousins’. The British commander-in-chief William Howe was equally ambivalent about waging civil war: that may explain why he prevaricated when he could have destroyed Washington’s army at Long Island.
It is also worth remembering that in economic terms the continental colonies remained of far less importance than those of the Caribbean. They were in fact heavily dependent on trade with Britain and it was not an unreasonable assumption that regardless of political arrangements they would remain so for the foreseeable future. With hindsight we know that to lose the United States was to lose a very large slice of the world’s economic future. But at the time the short-term costs of reimposing British authority in the thirteen colonies looked considerably larger than the short-term benefits of doing so.
True, the British had some military successes. They won, albeit at high cost, the first major engagement of the war at Bunker’s Hill. New York was taken in 1776 and Philadelphia, the rebel capital, in September the following year. The very hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed became a military hospital for wounded and dying Patriots. But the bottom line was that London could provide neither sufficient troops nor good enough generals to turn localized success into full-scale victory. By 1778 the rebels had re-established their control over most of the territory from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island. And when the British sought to switch their operations to the South, where they could count on stronger Loyalist support, localized successes at Savannah and Charleston could not prevent full-scale defeat. Cornwallis was drawn northwards by the rebel generals Horatio Gates and Nathanael Greene until he was forced to shift his headquarters into Virginia. The key moment came in 1781 when Washington, instead of attacking New York (as he had originally planned), moved south against Cornwallis. He did so on the advice of the French commander, comte de Rochambeau. Simultaneously, the French admiral, François de Grasse, defeated the British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves and blockaded the Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis was trapped on the Yorktown peninsula between the James and York rivers. Here was a reversal of the odds at Lexington: it was the British who were now outnumbered – by more than two to one – and outgunned.

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