The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (12 page)

The political ideas of Americans in 1760 did not take their origins from congregational democracy or from revivalistic religion. Most American ideas were a part of the great tradition of the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen, the radical Whig ideology that arose from a series of upheavals in seventeenth-century England -- the Civil War, the exclusion crisis of 1679-81, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Broadly speaking, this Whig theory described two sorts of threats to political freedom: a general moral decay of the people which would invite the intrusion of evil and despotic rulers, and the encroachment of executive authority upon the legislature, the attempt that power always made to subdue the liberty protected by mixed government.

The American Revolution revealed that this radical Whig understanding of politics had embedded itself deeply in American minds. In Britain only the dissenting fringe accepted the Whig analysis. Its broad acceptance in America has been explained as one of the consequences of an imbalance in political structure which saw executive authority legally

commissioned with great powers but actually weak in authority. "Swollen claims and shrunken powers," as one historian has described this institutional situation, yielded a bitter factionalism to be explained apparently only by those formulas of radical Whiggery which linked liberty to balanced government, and despotism to the over-mighty executive and to moral corruption.
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This interpretation is surely true in part and just as surely too simple in its concentration on the facts of institutional relationships. Radical Whig perceptions of politics attracted widespread support in America because they revived the traditional concerns of a Protestant culture that had always verged on Puritanism. That moral decay threatened free government could not come as a surprise to a people whose fathers had fled England to escape sin. The importance of virtue, frugality, industry, and calling was at the heart of their moral code. An overbearing executive and the threat of corruption through idle, useless officials, or placemen, had figured prominently in their explanations of their exile in America. For the values of the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen had earlier inspired those of the seventeenth century. They had formed an American mentality prone to conceive of politics in their terms. Thus radical Whiggery of the eighteenth century convinced Americans because it had been pervasive in their culture since the seventeenth.

The generation that made the Revolution were the children of the twice-born, the heirs of this seventeenth-century religious tradition. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and many who followed them into revolution may not have been men moved by religious passions. But all had been marked by the moral dispositions of a passionate Protestantism. They could not escape this culture; nor did they try. They were imbued with an American moralism that colored all their perceptions of politics. After 1760 they faced a political crisis that put these perceptions to an agonizing test. Their responses -- the actions of men who felt that Providence had set them apart for great purposes -- gave the Revolution much of its intensity and much of its idealism.

The English ministers who began tightening the screws on American smugglers in 1760 and who hoped to make the Americans pay a share of imperial burdens did not know the people they were dealing with-did not know them well, that is, and had little notion of their stiffnecked quality or of their capacity for principled action. For political tacticians of considerable skill, these ministers made some surprising mistakes: making decisions in ignorance of American views was one of the worst; and refusing to compromise when these views were expressed was hardly less serious. The process of governing Americans almost seemed to rob these English ministers of their political senses as they forgot the need for accommodation and flexibility. The great distance of America from Britain surely deadened political sensitivities; governing people they never saw made the political air so thin that many a keennosed politician lost the scent of American interest.

The unseen people were colonials in any case. The British constitution proclaimed them subordinate -- or at least the king's ministers thought it did. The language these ministers used, indeed the language of almost everyone who wrote or thought about the colonies, is revealing of rather general assumptions. The colonies were "plantations," "plants," and sometimes "children" of the English parent. All these terms implied that they were watched over, tended, managed, disciplined, and made to obey if recalcitrant. The assumption that these words conveyed is that it was right and proper for the colonies to conform to England's

desires. The colonies owed something to their founders; not the least of their debt was subordination and compliance.

Framing public policy out of a sense of abstract right is a dangerous practice for any government. English ministries of the 1760s were not notably resilient, and when their American plans ran into trouble they felt outraged. Principles self-evident to them had been violated, and the colonial relationship, once so satisfactory to those in authority, seemed betrayed.

Principle hardly seemed at stake when the new king's ministry, nominally headed by one of the great figures in eighteenth-century English politics, the Duke of Newcastle, began apprising him of his responsibilities and England's problems soon after he came to the throne in October 1760. The war with France no longer raged as it had even a year before, but there was no peace. There was war fatigue: Newcastle felt it and so did his friend Bute, and so did the king. Pitt, who still dominated English public life, did not -- in fact, he soon began to push for war with Spain.
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Newcastle, nervous, vacillating, constantly concerned about his health, could not, predictably, make up his mind. He feared and admired Pitt; he wanted to remain in office; he wanted to do his best for his king. He had held office, worked the parliamentary engines, and served two monarchs for forty years. When, in October 1761, Pitt left the government and Newcastle stayed in office, it was these inclinations to hang on, do what he had done for so long, that held him fast. Pitt departed over the king's refusal to be forced into war, even though the government had learned by October that the French and the Spanish had concluded a treaty, accomplished by their common hostility to Britain. Within three months Britain declared war on Spain, an action which led to further incredible victories.

By the spring of 1762, Newcastle, feeling shoved completely out of his king's confidence, left the government. Bute -- to the king's delight -now headed the ministry.

Bute lacked Newcastle's tenacity and Pitt's brilliance. As the king's adviser before he entered the government, he had enjoyed a measure of power without responsibility. This period must have been one of the most satisfying of his life. He, a Scot, tutored a young boy who would be king some day. The advice he gave was gratefully, even worshipfully, received. And if not out of sight, he remained out of the line of fire. Now, as the king's minister, he was exposed to abuse, and he got

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it. The dirty sniggers accompanying the rumors that he was the lover of George's mother were louder than ever, and all he could do was to ignore them.

Bute soon learned that though peacemakers are blessed, the world does not love them, for after the preliminary articles ending the war were concluded with France, he felt the rage of Pitt and the London mob. By February 1763 the treaty of peace in its final form was signed, and Bute fled as soon as he decently could in April.

Bute had managed to make one major decision affecting English politics and the American colonies before leaving office, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he had headed the ministry that made the decision. His ministry decided early in 1763, apparently in February, to keep a permanent force of royal troops in America -- a standing army.

King George III himself contributed in a detailed and concrete way to the decision. He took part, not out of an interest in the colonies, but because, like the Hanoverians before him, he wished to do well for the army. The army was his after all and, in 1762, as the war drew to an end the army faced uncertain days. It had grown during the Seven Years War, and it had provided employment and pay for numerous officers who gave the king and his ministries important political support. A good many colonels of regiments sat in Parliament, and they and their subordinates constituted a source of patronage for the Crown. What was to be done with these valuable officers with peace at hand and with the need to cut expenses of every sort pressing on the government? The young king worried over such questions, and therefore it is not surprising to find him writing his friend Bute in September 1762: "I have been some days drawing up a state of the troops for the Peace, and hope to send it this evening, by which the ten regiments raised at the beginning of the war remain, and yet the expense will be some hundred pounds cheaper than . . . in 1749."
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The'king continued to work for another four months on army estimates, the numbers of regiments and the money required to pay them. The American colonies entered his calculations only as they might be made to contribute to the maintenance of royal troops.
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Bute surely understood the king's concern and just as surely shared it, but Bute and Treasury officials had other concerns as well.
Canada,

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the West, and Florida all had Indian "problems" which called for solutions short of war. Pacification and security would require troops. The Board of Trade, the agency possessing the most information about the colonies, had long advocated imperial rather than local control of Indian affairs. Protection of white Americans, the Board implied on a number of occasions, could best be realized by regulating the Indian trade -and thereby preventing exploitation of the Indians by white traders, a fertile cause of conflict -- and by stopping land-grabbing whites from encroaching upon Indian lands. No imperial role in Indian affairs could be conceived that did not involve the use of the British army.
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In the next few years further uses for a standing army in America were to occur to British officials. The army, several came to believe, might collect customs duties and control American society. These beliefs did not exist in a clear or articulated form in 1763. Common sense and imperial vision seemed to require an army in America, and so the decision to keep one there was rather easily made.

Considering the long history of English antipathy to standing armies, the decision to maintain troops in America was accepted with surprising ease in Parliament. At any rate, the matter did not become a crucial issue there, nor did it receive a full review or debate. Again, common sense probably stilled doubts: there was in America a wilderness of lightly settled territories along the borders of established -- and valuable -- English colonies. In Canada there was a population of Frenchmen, recent enemies of doubtful loyalty; in the West there were the Indians, long valued for their trade and long feared for their violence; in the South, in Florida, there were the Spaniards, no more trustworthy than the French. And the English-Americans themselves, though reliably loyal, were unreliable in the arts of diplomacy and quite capable of provoking conflict with all their western neighbors. How but by stationing good British troops along the rim from Canada to Florida could security and stability be guaranteed? Common sense seemed to dictate the answer, and as for the tradition that denied the Crown the services of a standing army, that tradition seemed much more compelling within the British Isles than outside them. And so Parliament, a body that always believed itself blessed by common sense and by a concern for the rights of the subject, quietly put its doubts aside and just as quietly acquiesced.
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