The New Road to Serfdom (18 page)

Those who had settled New England came largely from the Eastern counties of England. They built their houses in the East Anglian style, and named their towns after their ancestral homes: Hertford and Cambridge, Boston and Billerica. The English counties that they left behind became the heartland of the Parliamentary cause in the 1640s, Cromwell’s Eastern Association.

When the fighting started in England, the New England Puritans began streaming back across the Atlantic to take up arms alongside their cousins. A majority of Harvard graduates in the year 1642 saw action with the Roundheads.

Virginia was a different story. Many of its colonists were from gentry families, and were often Episcopalian. Their family links were to the King’s party, and they were far likelier to remain loyal to the Crown.

Phillips shows, by tracing genealogies, that the battle lines that were drawn in 1642 had not been rubbed away in 1776. Broadly speaking, those whose ancestors had fought for the Stuarts were likely to be loyalists; those who descended from the parliamentary side were likely to be patriots. The strongest supporters of the Revolution in North America, other than the New England Yankees, were the grandchildren of Ulster Protestants. When things were going badly for the Continental Army, George Washington declared bleakly, “If defeated everywhere else, I will make my stand for liberty among the Scots-Irish in my native Virginia.”

Conversely, those likeliest to be Tories came, ancestrally, from what had been the Royalist parts of the British Isles: Northern and Western England, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, Catholic Ireland.

The rebel leaders were acutely aware of the link. They named their warships for Cromwell and Hampden, and drew consciously on the vocabulary of the earlier conflict, referring to American loyalists as “inimicals.” George III, too, saw the connection, and spoke mournfully of the rebellion as “my Presbyterian war.”

These same fault-lines can be seen in Britain at that time. Whigs, loosely descended from the Civil War
Roundheads, believed that the colonists had fair and reasonable grievances. Tories, heirs to the Civil War Cavaliers, argued that George III must assert his authority. London and the surrounding counties were broadly for the rebels, as were Lowland Scotland and the Puritan mill towns. The more conservative parts of the country, by and large, wanted the rising put down militarily. Ireland divided almost wholly along sectarian lines, Southern Catholics backing the King while Northern Protestants formed militia and drilled in imitation of their cousins in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The greatest British parliamentarians of the age backed the patriot leaders. The American cause was virtually the only issue that united Edmund Burke, the father of modern British conservatism, with the Whig leader, Charles James Fox. The most famous speeches of that era came from British allies of the colonists.

“I rejoice that America has resisted,” proclaimed William Pitt the Elder, setting out the case against the Stamp Act in 1766. “Three million people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest [of us].”

“Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American Empire,” said Burke in 1775, taking up the cause of no taxation without representation. “English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.”

When it became clear that the rebel cause was prevailing in 1780, Fox told the chamber, “If the ministry had succeeded in their first scheme on the liberties of America, the liberties of this country would have been at an end.”

Such orations were almost certainly a truer indication of public sentiment than was the official policy of the ministry. We cannot measure contemporary public opinion by election results, since Great Britain at that time had an extremely restricted franchise. We can, however, make an educated guess on the basis of such quantifiable data as newspaper circulation, petitions delivered to Parliament (either for Coercion or for Conciliation), and the position of those few MPs who, under the Byzantine electoral rules that pertained until 1832, represented a broader section of the electorate. Extrapolating from these sources, historians have inferred that most of the population of Great Britain was in sympathy with the colonists. Indeed, the balance of opinion in the British Isles seems to have been similar to that in North America, with Tories accounting for perhaps a third of the population. The difference, of course, was that many more Americans had the right to vote, so the colonial assemblies were more representative of their populations.

When, in March 2010, I organized the inaugural British Tea Party in the fashionably liberal town of Brighton, some British leftists—and some puzzled Americans—asked why I was borrowing the symbol of a
revolt against the British Crown. I reminded the audience of the state of public opinion in Britain in the 1770s. I spoke of the British heritage on which the original Tea Partiers had drawn. I recalled that the taxpayers’ revolt that had sparked the American Revolution had begun on my side of the Atlantic: the cost of the Seven Years’ War had pushed taxes up to 20 shillings for the average British subject, as against sixpence for the average colonist, and it had been the British government’s determination to export at least part of this cost to North America that began the quarrel. Nonetheless, I added, we were not Americans: We would drink our tea, not dump it into the English Channel.

I don’t recall this history in order to detract from the achievement of the American patriot leaders. It is true that Britain was halfhearted in its prosecution of the fighting. Many officers declined offers of command, and those who accepted fought dutifully rather than enthusiastically. It is true, too, that Britain had little appetite for the repression of its own kinsmen when there were more pressing battles to be waged against the Bourbon powers. Nonetheless, war is war, and there was something heroic about the willingness of the colonial leaders to take on what was already becoming the world’s greatest military power.

I recount the narrative, rather, to stress a point that has often been missed by historians and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. A common political culture
encompassed Britain and America before and after the formal rupture. The two states drew on a common political heritage. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic saw themselves as heirs to an inherited folkright of Saxon freedom, expressed in the common law. Both traced a direct political lineage back through the Glorious Revolution to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. If anything, Americans placed (and place) greater store by that document than Britons. The site where Magna Carta was signed, at Runnymede in my constituency, went unmarked until 1957 when a memorial was erected there—by the American Bar Association.

It is no surprise, then, that amity was soon restored between the adversaries. When Britain formally recognized U.S. independence, John Adams became the first American minister to London. The speech he made, as he presented his credentials to George III, is so handsome and affecting that it is worth quoting in full:

The king was visibly moved, and replied with a generosity that had eluded him during the recent conflict:

And so, in time, it came to pass. The rapprochement was not immediate. It took British Tories another generation to accept emotionally what they had accepted legally: that America was truly an independent state. A war—albeit an inconclusive and absurd war—was fought before the British state was fully reconciled to its lost jurisdiction. Once this had happened, though, the way was open to the Anglo-American imperium that has lasted to our own day. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine was made possible—enforced, we might almost say—by the Royal Navy. And in the twentieth century, Britain and America fought side by side, first against Prussian autocracy, then against Nazism, and finally against Soviet Communism.

Those battles, and those victories, were not based solely on “the circumstances of language, religion and blood.” They were based, even more, on a shared political heritage, an identity of culture and outlook.

__________

Like other British MEPs, I am occasionally teased by Continental colleagues about the willingness of what they call “the Anglo-Saxons” to line up with the United States in foreign policy. Britain, they scoff, has turned itself into an American aircraft carrier. Do we have no foreign policy of our own?

Gently, I try to explain that, coming as we do from a common culture, we tend to react in similar ways when we face the same problems. We have a number of things in common, I tell them, we Anglo-Saxons. We try to see the other chap’s point of view. We revere our laws and our parliaments. We bridle at injustice. We dislike bullies. We are slow—often too slow—to anger, but terrifying when roused.

As Kipling put it:

To return to Kagan’s metaphor, if Americans are from Mars, then the free English-speaking nations share the Martian orbit, rather than that of Venusian
Europe. Look at the countries that are first to deploy force alongside the United States and you see the same names coming up again and again: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

America doesn’t have to choose between Europeanization and isolation. There is another option: the Anglosphere. Instead of pursuing harmonization as Europeans do—through rules and bureaucracies—we should prefer an organic and wholly voluntary association of free peoples. Instead of integration among states, let us have collaboration between individuals, businesses, and other bodies. Instead of a union of governments, let us pursue a union of values.

Until very recently, states were defined by their geographical location. In the post-war era, regional blocs seemed to make sense. The United States concerned itself with its hemisphere, as it had since the 1820s. Britain joined a European customs union. Australia and New Zealand took on responsibilities in the South Pacific.

Technological change, however, has rendered geographical proximity irrelevant. The Internet has made nonsense of distance. Capital now surges around the world at the touch of a button. It is as easy to sell to another continent as to the next county. Indeed, often easier. Businesses in my constituency generally are more comfortable dealing with Anglosphere firms—firms that share their language, common law system, commercial
practices, and accountancy rules—than with businesses that happen to be in the EU.

The United States doesn’t need to sign up to supranational structures in order to prove its internationalist credentials. It doesn’t need to sacrifice sovereignty or democracy in order to participate in the comity of nations. It can, instead, seek to inspire by example, holding true to the precepts of its constitution, offering its hand to any nation that accepts those values.

Let me return, one more time, to Thomas Jefferson, a bust of whom stands on my desk as I write these words. Jefferson predicted that there would be a thick flow of settlers from the Old World to the New, and that few would choose to make the return journey. His prediction, of course, came true in a spectacular way. But it is important to be clear about the basis of Jefferson’s confidence. He didn’t think that there was a magical quality in American soil, or American water, or the American gene pool. (He did, slightly eccentrically, tell a French friend, “Our sky is always clear, that of Europe always cloudy,” which statement one can attribute either to patriotic exuberance or to a radically different eighteenth-century climate.) Rather, he believed that the genius of America lay in its system of government, and that any country that ordered its affairs along republican principles could be as happy and prosperous as the United States.