Chapter 4
In This Chapter
● Engaging in the first world wars
● Relaxing religious views
● Fighting the French and the Native Americans — again
● Alienating the colonists with annoying acts
● Taking on the redcoats: The battle for independence begins
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, European powers had been alternately exploring the New World and sparring over what they found. It was time for the main event: a showdown for control of the American continent.
Actually, it was time for a series of main events. As this chapter unfolds, Europe engages in a succession of wars in which America is not only a pawn but also a battleground. Britain comes out on top, but her relationship with the American colonies is dramatically changed.
Britain views the colonies mainly as economic enterprises, whereas the colonists have a growing dislike for being told what to do by a distant government. The differing perspectives clash until, as the chapter ends, Britain gets popped in the snoot.
Looking at America in 1700
The English colonies in America had filled in the gaps between the first two settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts by 1700 and, in fact, had gone beyond them. They now stretched from Maine to South Carolina. But they were a pretty skinny bunch, as colonies go. Few settlers lived more than 75 miles from the Atlantic coast, and vast stretches of land lay unsettled by any nation, although claimed by more than one.
Edward Teach
The American colonies' relative prosperity was not lost on a group of sea-going entrepreneurs who eliminated the middlemen by stealing other people's things directly. We call them pirates, and they were at their height in the early part of the eighteenth century. Edward Teach — also known as Blackbeard — was one of them, and he was a Hollywood casting agent's dream buccaneer.
Born either in Jamaica or England, probably around 1680, Teach terrorized the coastal waters off the Carolinas and Virginia for several years. He was said to have braided his long beard and tied it with red ribbons; put lit matches under his hat when attacking so it looked like his head was on fire; carried six pistols; and had 14 wives, whom he was said to have shared with his crew. At his peak, Teach commanded a fleet of four ships and perhaps 300 men. He was pardoned at one point by the governor of North Carolina, but he resumed pirating within a few weeks.
On November 22, 1718, Teach's ship was overtaken by a British frigate off the coast of North Carolina. After a brief and bloody battle, Teach was killed. It reportedly took five pistol wounds and 20 sword cuts to do the job. He was then beheaded and his head was taken to Virginia, where it was put on display.
The population had reached 275,000 to 300,000, including 25,000 African slaves. Most people — as many as 90 percent — lived in small communities or farms. The population of New York City was about 5,000; Charlestown about 2,000.
Many of the newcomers were not English, but people from other Western European regions, such as Ireland, France, Scotland, and Germany, as well as the Scandinavian countries.
The colonies were maturing as they grew. Boston and Philadelphia were major publishing centers. Small manufacturing firms were turning out goods such as furniture and iron products that lessened the colonies’ dependence on goods from England. And increasing secularism was loosening the hold of religious authority on everyday life. In fact, things were going along okay, except for all that fighting in Europe.
Colonizing New France
While New England was filling up with Puritans and the Southern colonies with tobacco growers, the area of North America dominated by the French was progressing more slowly.
By 1663, when Canada officially became a French crown colony, Quebec had only about 550 people, and the entire region had fewer than 80,000 Europeans by 1750.
One reason for the lack of settlers was that the colony was strictly Catholic, and Protestants from France were banned. Many French Protestants thus settled in the English colonies. Another reason was a looney-tunes system carried over from the Middle Ages that awarded vast tracts of the best land to just a few people. A third was the emphasis on fur-trading — conducted by men called courers de bois (runners of the woods) — instead of on agriculture, for which people had to settle down.
French officials did what they could to increase the population. Bachelors were censured, and fathers of unwed 16-year-old girls were fined. Despite such efforts, the population remained low, especially compared to the English colonies.
Although few in number, the French were daring explorers, roaming as far south as present-day New Orleans and as far west as the Rocky Mountains.
But the lack of permanent settlements by the French in the vast areas they explored, coupled with their small numbers, spelled trouble for their efforts to hold on to what they had when the wars in Europe spilled over to America.
Fighting the First True World Wars
Eighteenth-century royalty didn’t need much of an excuse to start a war — they fought over everything from who should be the next king of Spain to the lopping-off of a sea captain’s ear. Their willingness to fight was based partly on greed for more territory and the wealth it could bring, and partly on their fear that other countries would beat them to it and become more powerful.
What made these wars different from their predecessors was that they were global in scope, fought all over Europe, India, North and South America, and the Caribbean. The main combatants were the French and English, although the Spanish, Dutch, and Austrians did their share of fighting.
France and England were pretty even matches. England had a better navy, but France had a better army. In North America, England’s colonies had a much larger population: 1.5 million compared to the French colonies’ 80,000 in 1750. England’s colonies had a much more varied economy, the protection of the English navy, and the support of the Iroquois Confederacy, a six-tribe alliance of Native Americans who hated the French. The French colonists, on the other hand, had better military leaders, did less quarreling among themselves than the English colonists, and had Native American allies of their own.
So, here’s what happened in the first three true world wars.
King William's War
This was the warm-up bout. After a revolution by Protestants in England, James II, a Catholic, was tossed out. Protestant William III and his wife Mary were brought in from the Netherlands and put on the throne in 1689. This didn’t sit well with the French king, Louis XIV, a Catholic. After William III sided with other countries against France in a territorial dispute, a war was on in Europe that lasted until 1697.
In America, the war went back and forth. The French led Native American raiding parties into New York and practiced a kind of warfare that was to become known as guerilla fighting: ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. The English outlasted the attacks but botched attempts to conquer Quebec and Montreal. The war pretty much ended in a draw.
Queen Anne's War
After King William’s War ended, Europe took all of four years to catch its breath. Then in 1701, Louis XIV of France tried to put his grandson on the throne of Spain. Queen Anne, who had succeeded William in England, objected, and they were back at it again.
This time the English colonists found themselves fighting the Spanish in the south and the French in the north. As with the previous war, there were few big battles and lots of raids and counter-raids, with both sides employing Native American allies.
When the war finally ended in 1713, Louis XIV got to put his grandson on the Spanish throne, but England got Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson River Valley, which put it in good position to take over even more of Canada in future wars.
King George's War
Most wars have more than one cause, but historians with a whimsical side like to start this one with an English smuggler named Robert Jenkins. Spanish revenue agents caught Jenkins in 1731, and in the course of being interrogated, he involuntarily had one of his ears removed. “Take this back to the king, your master,” a Spanish official was said to have said, “whom, if he were present, I would serve in the same fashion.”
Keeping a not-too-tight ship
While it was customary to give sailors a daily ration of rum in the British navy, it was sometimes not a great idea in hot climates because it made some of them tipsy. So in 1741, on an otherwise unsuccessful expedition to seize the Spanish stronghold of Cartagena in what is now Colombia, a British admiral named Edward Vernon diluted the rum with water. The sailors dubbed the watered-down drink after Vernon's nickname, which was "Old Grog."
The eminent historian Samuel Eliot Morrison attaches two postscripts to the story. One is that for the first time on the Vernon expedition, colonial fighters were referred to as "Americans" by the British, rather than "provincials." The second is that, on the trip, Vernon's surname was adopted for the family estate of an American captain named Lawrence Washington. Washington had a halfbrother named George who also made some contributions to history.
Jenkins did take his ear back to England, but he took his time about it and didn’t actually tell his tale to Parliament until 1738. It didn’t matter much and a new war was on anyway. It eventually merged with a larger war that broke out in Europe. In America, the same kind of fighting that had taken place in the earlier wars was taking place again. The British colonists took a key port called Louisbourg, which commanded the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but they had to give it back as part of the 1748 treaty that settled the war.
Awakening to Greater Religious Freedom
Despite the nagging presence of almost-continual war, the American colonies were doing pretty well. And as the colonists did better economically, they began to loosen up in terms of their religious beliefs, too. “Pennsylvania,” said a German observer, by way of example, “is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”
It wasn’t so much that Americans were becoming less devout, but more a function of their becoming less rigid and more likely to question the practice of most clergy to dictate exactly what they were to think and believe.
In the 1730s, a reaction to this shifting of religious attitudes resulted in what came to be known as the Great Awakening. Its catalyst was a genius named Jonathan Edwards. Tall and delicately built, Edwards entered Yale at the age of 13. By the time he was 21, he was the school’s head tutor. He was a brilliant theologian and wrote papers on insects that are still respected in entomological circles.
He was also — excuse the expression — a hell of a public speaker. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked,” he thundered in a sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
But Edwards’s message, preached to mass audiences throughout New England in the 1730s and 1740s, was not just fire-and-brimstone yelling. Edwards believed that God was to be loved and not just feared and that internal goodness was the best way to be happy on this earth.
Edwards was joined, and eventually surpassed, on the revival circuit by a Georgia-based minister named George Whitefield. Called the “Great Itinerant” because of his constant traveling, Whitefield drew crowds in the thousands. On one crusade, he traveled 800 miles in 75 days and gave 175 sermons. Equipped with an amazing voice and a flair for the melodramatic, Whitefield quite literally made members of his crowds wild. He made seven continental tours from 1740 to 1770, and it’s safe to say he was America’s first superstar.
Although the Great Awakening had run its course by the time of the American Revolution, its impact was deep and lasting. It sparked widespread discussions about religion that in turn led to the development of new denominations, which in turn helped lead to more religious tolerance among the colonists. Several of the new or revitalized denominations were encouraged to start colleges, including Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Columbia, to ensure a steady stream of trained ministers.
The Great Awakening also helped break down barriers between the colonies and unify them through their common experience with it. And as the first spontaneous mass movement in America, it heightened the individual’s sense of power when it was combined with that of others.
The right to compare governors to monkeys
John Peter Zenger was a German-born printer who, in 1734, was also the editor of a New York newspaper called the Weekly Journal. After articles appeared attacking the policies of Gov. William Cosby and comparing the governor and his supporters to monkeys and dogs, Zenger was charged with seditious libel and jailed.
At his trial, Zenger's attorney, a Philadelphia lawyer named Andrew Hamilton, argued that the articles were basically true, and truth was a valid defense against libel. The judge, a friend of the governor's, told the jury to ignore Hamilton's argument. Instead, the jury ignored the judge and set Zenger free.
Although the case didn't immediately win the press the freedom it would enjoy later, it did help establish the foundation that prevents U.S. government officials from stifling printed material. It also reaffirmed an old English tradition of juries ignoring the legal niceties of a case when impressed by an eloquent lawyer.
The French and Native Americans: At It Again
Despite being filled with the divine spirit of the Great Awakening, American colonists were ready by 1750 to once more start killing the French and Native Americans. The first to do so were led by a tall, 22-year-old Virginia militia captain named George Washington.
This time the world war started in America. English speculators had secured the rights to 500,000 acres in the Ohio River Valley. At about the same time, the French had built a series of forts in the same area as a way to keep lines of communication and supply open between Canada and Louisiana.
In 1754, a year after he had conducted a diplomat/spy mission, Washington was sent to the Ohio Country with 150 men. They ran into a French detachment, the Virginians fired, and the French fled.
“I heard the bullets whistle,” Washington wrote later, “and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
The French quickly set out to charm Washington by counterattacking a hastily erected fort the young Virginian had put up (and aptly named “Fort Necessity”) and forcing Washington to surrender — on July 4. Then, in a stroke of luck for a nation yet unborn, the French let Washington lead his men home.
Pontiac and pox
Pontiac was a chief of the Ottawa tribe, which had historically sided with the French in the wars against the British. An able leader and outstanding orator, Pontiac realized early on that his tribe couldn't trust the French or the British, and he worked quietly to unite tribes in the area in a common cause. When British settlers hanged several Native Americans after a dispute among Native Americans that didn't involve white settlers, a war started.
The resultant fighting was nasty and prolonged, and eight British forts fell to Pontiac's troops. So in July 1763, when Col. Henry Boquet suggested distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the Native Americans, British military leader Jeffrey Amherst agreed, writing to Boquet that he should also "try every other method that can serve to extirpate [wipe out] this execrable race."
Whether this form of biological warfare was ever followed through is unclear. But smallpox did break out among the Native Americans. By 1765, decimated by disease, outnumbered, and running low on supplies, Pontiac and his allies sued for peace. The Native American leader was killed by another Native American in 1769 and eventually had a car named after him. Amherst lived to the ripe old age of 80. A Massachusetts town and a college were named after him.
Unifying the colonies
While Washington was savoring his first taste of battle, representatives of 8 of the 13 colonies were meeting in Albany, New York, at the request of the British government. The purpose was to see whether the colonies could be more unified. The British wanted more unity because they figured it would make it easier to fight the French and also to govern the colonies.
But a few far-seeing colonists — most notably a Philadelphia printer, inventor, scientist, and man-about-town named Benjamin Franklin — saw it as an opportunity to increase the colonies’ economic and political clout.
Franklin engineered a sound plan for a colonial union, and the gathered representatives approved it. But the assemblies in the individual colonies rejected it, mostly because they felt they would give up too much of their independence.
Defeating British General Braddock
On the battlefield, meanwhile, the British had sent two of their worst regiments to the colonies and given command to a general named Edward Braddock. Though undeniably brave (he had five horses shot from under him in one battle), Braddock was arrogant and a plodding bozo when it came to military strategy. He was also contemptuous of the American militia under his command.
In 1755, Braddock and a force of about 1,400 men, including Washington, marched on French forts in the Ohio Country. A force of French and Native Americans surprised the British force. Braddock was killed, along with almost a thousand of his men.
Braddock’s defeat was just one of a bunch of losses the British suffered over the next two years. The war in America merged with a war in Europe that involved all the major European powers. It went badly for the British in both theaters.
Outfighting the French
In 1757, however, things began looking up. An able administrator named William Pitt became head of the London government. Pitt skillfully used the superior British navy and appointed good military leaders.
Among them were James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst. Wolfe and Amherst led a British force against the French fortress-city of Quebec in 1759. In one of the most important battles fought in North America, the British took the city. Montreal fell in the following year, and the French were finished in the New World.
The war was formally settled by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The British got all of Canada, all of America east of the Mississippi, Florida, and some Caribbean islands.
The American colonists got rid of the decades-old threat from the French.
More than in previous wars, men from different colonies fought alongside each other, helping to break down barriers between the colonies. Future leaders matured. And the animosity and friction that sprang up between British military leaders and the Americans lingered long after the war was over.
To see what land holding Britain, France, and Spain maintained in the mid-eighteenth century, take a look at Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1: Map of North and Central America during the mideighteenth century showing what belonged to Britain, France, and Spain.
Growing like a Weed
If there was one inarguable fact about the American colonies in the mid to late eighteenth century, it was that they were growing like crazy. In 1730, the population of the 13 colonies was about 655,000. Boston was the biggest city, with a population of about 13,000, while New York and Philadelphia were home to about 8,500 people each.
By 1760, the population had reached 1.6 million, not including African slaves, and by 1775, the white population stood at 2.5 million. Philadelphia was the largest city in that year, with a population of about 34,000.
Accounting for the population explosion
The population explosion was caused by two things. One was the natural birth rate of the colonists. Partly because of the time-honored farm family tradition that large families meant more people to work (and maybe because there wasn’t much else to do on those long winter nights in the country), the size of many American families was astounding. Benjamin Franklin wrote of a Philadelphia woman who had 14 children, 82 grandchildren, and 110 greatgrandchildren by the time she died at the age of 100. The growth rate was even more astounding when you consider the high infant mortality rate. One woman was reported to have lost 20 children at birth or soon thereafter, and the average woman who reached menopause had seven or eight surviving children.
But the growth was by no means all from within the colonies. Immigration was the second factor in the population explosion. It continued at a brisk pace, not only from England but also from other Western European countries. A 1909 population study estimated that at the time of the American Revolution, about 82 percent of the white population was from England and Wales; 5 percent from Scotland; 6 percent from the German states; and about 7 percent from Holland, Ireland, and other countries.
Despite the rapid growth, the colonies suffered a postwar recession after the years of fighting with the French stopped in 1763. Still, they were on a fairly sound economic foundation. About 90 percent of the colonists were involved in agriculture, with tobacco, corn, rice, indigo, and wheat being the main crops. Fishing and whaling were big in New England. Timber was the number one manufacturing product, and because trees were plentiful and cheap, shipbuilding boomed. By the time of the American Revolution, one-third of the British navy had been built in America.
Living the good life
Although the colonists shared problems common to people all over the world in the eighteenth century, such as nasty epidemics, they generally ate better, lived longer, and were more prosperous than any of their European counterparts. Land was cheap and had to sustain fewer people because the population was smaller. Because labor was often in short supply, wages were higher, which raised the standard of living.
While enjoying the protections of the formidable British Empire’s military, the average American colonist, if he paid any taxes at all, paid far less than his British cousin. The argument against British taxes, put forth by the eloquent Boston lawyer James Otis, that “taxation without representation is tyranny” was a bit hypocritical. After all, more than a few Americans had to pay taxes to American local governments and still couldn’t vote or didn’t have a representative in the colonial assemblies.
Moreover, for the most part, Britain didn’t interfere in the colonies’ internal affairs. Mostly, the mother country concerned itself with defense and trade issues, and many of the trade laws were mutually beneficial to both sides of the water (unless you happened to be a big-time smuggler like John Hancock, who later became the first to sign the Declaration of Independence and was Public Enemy Number One as far as the British were concerned).
The "other" arrivals
One of the fastest-growing segments of the eighteenth-century American population didn't grow voluntarily. In 1725, an estimated 75,000 African slaves resided in the colonies. By 1790, the number was 700,000. The 1790 census reported that there were slaves in all but three states: Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Forty-three percent of the people living in South Carolina belonged to other people; in Virginia, 39 percent were slaves.
More than a few colonists raised their voices in alarm at the increasing number of slaves. Some protested for humanitarian reasons. Benjamin Franklin argued the slave system didn't make sense from an economic perspective. Even the most ardent proslavery apostles had their doubts. Some were afraid of slave uprisings if the numbers continued to grow, while others wanted to stop the importation of slaves so the value of the ones already in America would increase. But the British government refused to allow bans on slave importation by the colonies, for fear of damaging the lucrative trade. This refusal became a sore spot between Britain and America.
So, most Americans in the 1760s and early 1770s had no interest in independence from Britain. What they wanted was what they had: protection by the world’s mightiest navy, generally cozy trade rules, and freedoms and rights unequalled in the rest of the world.
Britain, however, couldn’t afford to maintain the status quo.
Looking at the Brits’ Point of View
For more than six decades, the British had been in a state of almost continual warfare, mostly against the French and Spanish, their major rivals in the New World. After all that fighting, Britain had established itself as the major power in the Western World, with perhaps the most far-flung holdings since the Roman Empire.
But this power didn’t come cheap. Before the last French and Native American war, which lasted from 1755 to 1763, the British national debt stood at the equivalent of about $120 million. After the war, it was more than double that. Because a lot of the debt had come about by defending Americans from the French and Native Americans in America, the British government quite reasonably concluded it was only fair that the Americans pay for part of it.
They didn’t even ask the colonists for their fair share. In fact, all the British government wanted was that the Americans pay a measly one-third of the future costs of stationing 10,000 British troops in the colonies to protect them.
At the same time, British officials wanted to find a way to prevent friction among the colonists, the Native Americans, and the French traders who were now British subjects. The easiest way to do that, the British reasoned, was to keep the groups apart. By limiting western expansion by the American colonists, the British felt they could placate the Native Americans, who were feeling a bit edgy by the ever-broadening presence of the colonists. The British also wanted to do something about all the smuggling that was going on in the colonies, which meant conducting surprise raids and inspections of suspected smugglers’ homes.
In the hands of an adroit diplomat, it may have been possible to make all this acceptable to the colonists. After all, the overwhelming majority of them were loyal subjects of Mother Britain. Unfortunately for Mother Britain, however, most of her political leaders between 1763 and 1775 were stubborn, stupid, arrogant, or all three. One of them even went insane for a while, yet remained prime minister for two years. The king, George III, was a popular, hard-working fellow with oodles of personal integrity. But he was more politician than statesman, and he chose his advisors and ministers more on their willingness to agree with him than their abilities to lead.
In addition, the British and the Americans fundamentally disagreed on what role Parliament, the British governing body, should play in the colonists’ lives. For Britain, it was simple: Parliament made the rules for Britain and all its colonies. For America, however, the role of Parliament was negligible. The colonists wanted to come up with their own rules in their own miniparliaments and deal directly with the king. In the end, it came down to a fight over who should tell whom what to do.
Britain and America: Heading toward Divorce
Starting in 1763, Britain and her American colonies began to irritate each other almost incessantly. Like an impatient parent with an unruly child, Britain tried different methods to instill discipline. Only America wasn’t such a kid anymore, or as Ben Franklin put it: “We have an old mother that peevish is grown; / She snubs us like children that scarce walk alone; / She forgets we’re grown up and have sense of our own.” The following set of irritants led to a revolution.
The Proclamation of 1763
One of the first things Britain wanted to do after finally whipping the French was to calm down the Native Americans, who were understandably upset by the generally pushy, and often genocidal, actions of the colonists. So King George III decided that as of October 7, 1763, no colonist could settle beyond the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. That decision meant America would remain basically a collection of coastal colonies.
The idea was to give everyone a sort of timeout after all the fighting. But even if it was well intentioned, it was impractical. For one thing, a bunch of colonials were already living west of the dividing line and weren’t about to move just because some potentate thousands of miles away said so.
Worse, the decree was a slap in the face to those who had fought against the French and Native Americans with the expectation that winning meant they could move west to vast tracts of free land. In the end, it was an unenforceable law that did nothing but anger the colonists and vex British officials when it wasn’t obeyed.
The Revenue Acts (1764)
On the other side of the sea, more than a few Brits were peeved that their colonial cousins paid next to nothing when it came to taxes, especially
because the British were among the highest taxed people in the world. So British Prime Minister George Grenville pushed a bill through Parliament that was explicitly designed to raise money from the colonists to pay for their defense.
The law actually lowered the tax on molasses but raised or imposed taxes on other things like sugar, wine, linen, and silk. Colonists objected, asserting that Parliament had no right to impose taxes on them without their assent. They also organized boycotts of the taxed goods and increased their already booming smuggling enterprises.
The Stamp Act (1765)
Unsatisfied with the revenue from the Revenue Acts, Parliament imposed a new levy on 50 items, including dice, playing cards, newspapers, marriage licenses, college degrees, and just about every other kind of legal document. Some of the taxes doubled the cost of the item. Not only that, the items had to be stamped or have a stamped receipt on them, showing the tax had been paid.
British citizens had been paying similar taxes for years, at even higher rates. But American colonists saw the Stamp Act taxes as only the beginning. Paying anything, they argued, was an invitation to be milked dry later.
Samuel Adams
He was a flop at business and a crummy public speaker — and perhaps America's first truly great politician. More than any of his contemporaries, Samuel Adams kept the colonies on the road to independence.
Born to a prosperous family, Adams graduated from Harvard. After failing at a business of his own, he took over a bustling family brewery and managed to run it into the ground. Then he became a tax collector and narrowly avoided jail for mismanaging funds.
But Adams was a success at backroom maneuvering. He helped organize the Sons of Liberty, the Boston Tea Party, and the minutemen. He wrote tirelessly for colonial newspapers on the urge to stand up to Britain, and his letters urging action were circulated throughout America. When the movement seemed to be sputtering, Adams kept it alive almost single-handedly with his writing and organizing.
He attended both continental congresses as a delegate and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. But once independence was won, there was no need for a rabble-rouser. Although elected governor of Massachusetts for one four-year term in 1794, Adams had dropped from national prominence by the time of his death in 1803, at the age of 81.
In reaction to the tax, nine colonies sent 27 delegates to a meeting in New York City. The group drew up a petition and sent it to England, where it was ignored. But the colonies also began a boycott of British goods, which was not ignored. Groups calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty” encouraged and bullied their fellow colleagues to wear “homespun” clothing instead of British wool. They also tarred and feathered more than a few would-be tax collectors.
The boycott had its desired effect. In 1766, under pressure from British manufacturers, Parliament repealed the taxes. But it also tried to save face by declaring that henceforth it had the right to pass any laws it wanted to govern the colonies. Americans rejoiced at the tax repeal. They praised “Good King George.” In New York, they even erected a statue of him in his honor. And they blithely ignored the warning from Parliament.
The Townshend Act (1767)
British Prime Minister William Pitt was a capable leader. But when he had a mental breakdown in 1766, he handed over the government to one of his lieutenants, Charles Townshend, also known as “Champagne Charley” because he was quite eloquent when drunk. A cocky sort, Townshend vowed to squeeze some money out of the obstinate American colonies, and he got Parliament to impose taxes on a number of goods, including glass, paper, paint, and tea. The revenues were to be used to pay the salaries of royal judges and governors in the colonies. To be fair, Townshend also dropped import duties on some American products entering England, thus making their export more profitable for the colonies.
It was too small a gesture as far as many colonists were concerned. For one thing, many of them had grown extremely fond of tea and were not keen on paying any tax on it. For another, they didn’t like the idea of the money going to pay judges and governors. Up until that point, the officials’ salaries had been controlled by colonial legislatures, which gave them a fair amount of influence over their policies.
Eager to show he meant business, Townshend sent two regiments of red-coated British troops — sneeringly dubbed “lobsterbacks” by the locals — to Boston in 1768. That set up the next confrontation.
The Boston Massacre (1770)
Because the soldiers sent to Boston were poorly paid, some of them tried to find part-time work, a practice that didn’t sit well with many Bostonians. So it wasn’t unusual for fights to break out between soldiers and groups of colonists.
On the night of March 5, a small mob of lowlifes began throwing rocks and snowballs at a British sentry outside the customs house. Another 20 British soldiers appeared with fixed bayonets, the crowd grew to as many as 300 boys and men, and after about 30 minutes of being taunted and pelted with rocks and sticks, one of the soldiers opened fire. A few minutes later, 11 members of the mob were dead or wounded.
At a subsequent trial, the soldiers were ably defended by a Boston lawyer named John Adams, and all but two were acquitted. The two soldiers found guilty were branded on the hand and then let go. But the radicals among the colonists milked the incident for all it was worth. A highly exaggerated engraving of the “massacre” was made by a silversmith named Paul Revere, and copies of it circulated all over the colonies.
Ironically, on the day of the incident, the Townshend Acts were repealed by Parliament — except for the tax on tea.
The Boston Tea Party (1773)
Despite the widespread publicity surrounding the tragedy in Boston, cooler heads prevailed for the next year or two. Moderates on both sides of the Atlantic argued that compromises could still be reached.
Then the powerful but poorly run British East India Company found it had 17 million pounds of surplus tea on its hands. So the British government gave the company a monopoly on the American tea business. With a monopoly, the company could lower its prices enough to undercut the smuggled tea the colonists drank instead of paying the British tax. But even with lower prices, the colonists still didn’t like the arrangement. It was the principle of the tax itself, not the cost of the tea. Shipments of English tea were destroyed or prevented from being unloaded or sold.
On December 16, 1773, colonists poorly disguised as Native Americans boarded three ships in Boston Harbor, smashed in 342 chests of tea, and dumped the whole mess into the harbor, where, according to one eyewitness, “it piled up in the low tide like haystacks.” No one was seriously hurt, although one colonist was reportedly roughed up a bit for trying to stuff some of the tea in his coat instead of throwing it overboard.
King George III wasn’t amused by the colonists’ lack of respect. “The die is now cast,” he wrote to his latest prime minister, Lord North, who had succeeded Townshend upon his sudden death. “The colonies must either submit or triumph.”
The “Intolerable” Acts (1774)
In response to the tea terrorism, Parliament passed a series of laws designed to teach the upstarts a thing or two. They were called the “Repressive Acts” in England, but to Americans, they were “Intolerable.” The new laws closed Boston Harbor until the colonists paid back the damage they had wrought, thus cutting the city off from sources of food, medical supplies, and other goods. The laws also installed a British general as governor of Massachusetts and repealed such liberties as the right to hold town meetings.
At the same time, the Brits passed the Quebec Act, a law that gave more freedom to conquered French subjects in Canada, including the right to continue customs such as nonjury trials in civil cases. Though a sensible thing to do from a British perspective, it incensed Americans, especially at a time when they felt their own freedoms were being messed with. The act also pushed the borders of the Quebec province well into the Ohio Valley, which infuriated colonials who had fought several wars to keep the French out of that same valley.
The acts galvanized the colonies into a show of unity that had only occasionally been shown before. Food and supplies poured in by land to Boston from all over America. And in Virginia, the colonial legislature decided to try to get representatives from all the colonies together for a meeting.
Congressing over Cocktails
On September 5, 1774, leaders from all of the colonies but Georgia gathered in Philadelphia to talk things over. There were 56 delegates, all of them men and about half of them lawyers. Some, such as New York’s John Jay, were politically conservative. Others, such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry, were firebreathing radicals. Despite their differences and the serious state of events, all of them apparently managed to have a pretty good time over the seven-week meeting — except for Massachusetts’ Samuel Adams, who had an ulcer and had to stick to bread and milk.
His cousin John Adams had no such problem. He dined on “Flummery, [a sweet dessert], jellies, sweetmeats of 20 sorts, trifles and . . . [he] drank Madeira [a wine] at a great rate, and found no inconvenience in it.”
Tough love and fighting words
"I love the Americans because they love liberty . . . but if they carry their notion of liberty too far, as I fear they do - if they will not be subject to the laws of this country . . . they have not a more determined opposer than me. This is the mother country, they are the children, they must obey." — William Pitt, member of the House of Lords, 1770.
"The gentlemen cry 'peace, peace,' but there is no peace! The war has actually begun! . . . Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
— Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia legislature, March 23, 1775.
But the delegates to what is called the First Continental Congress did more than party, even though they had no real power except the power of persuasion. Several delegates wrote essays that suggested the colonies stay under the supervision of the king but have nothing to do with Parliament. They petitioned Parliament to rescind the offending laws. The group also proclaimed that colonists should have all the rights other British subjects had, such as electing representatives to make the laws they were governed by, and that all trade with Britain should cease until the “Intolerable” Acts were repealed.
The Congress also resolved that if one of the colonies was attacked, all the rest would defend it. And, probably much to the dismay of some members, the Congress resolved to abstain from tea and wine (but not rum) and to swear off recreational pursuits like horseracing and cock fighting until the troubles with England were resolved. The meeting served to draw the colonies closer together than ever before, as shown in this quote by one colonist:
“The distinctions between New Englanders and Virginians are no more,” declared Patrick Henry. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”
They adjourned on October 26, pledging to come back in May if things didn’t get better by then. Things didn’t.
Mr. Revere, Your Horse Is Ready
The Congress’s decision to boycott all trade with Britain was embraced with enthusiasm almost everywhere. Lists of suspected traitors who continued to trade were published, and tar and feathers were vigorously applied to those who ignored the boycott.
While businessmen in England fretted, the colonists’ actions were met with disdain by a majority of the members of Parliament. Lord North, the prime minister, resolved to isolate the troublemakers in Massachusetts and thus stifle dissent in other areas.
But some British knew better. Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief in America, reported that things were coming to a head. “If you think ten thousand men are enough,” he wrote to North, “send twenty; if a million [pounds] is thought to be enough, give two. You will save both blood and treasure in the end.”
In April 1775, Gage decided to make a surprise march from his headquarters in Boston to nearby Concord, where he hoped to seize a storehouse of rebel guns and ammunition and maybe arrest some of the rebels’ leaders.
But the colonists knew they were coming, thanks to a network of spies and militia called the minutemen, aptly named because they were supposed to be ready to quickly spring into action. One of these was Paul Revere, the son of a French immigrant.
In addition to being a master silversmith, Revere made false teeth and surgical tools, and he was pretty good on a horse, too. So when word came on the night of April 18 that the British were marching on Concord, Revere and two other men, William Dawes and Doctor Samuel Prescott, rode out to warn that the British were coming. After rousing the town of Lexington, Revere and Dawes were captured and briefly detained. But Prescott escaped and made it to Concord. (Revere became the most famous of the three, however, because a poet named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made him the star of a wildly popular poem in 1863.)
When the 700 British soldiers marched through Lexington on the morning of April 19 on their way to Concord, they encountered 77 colonials. “Don’t fire unless fired upon,” said the minutemen’s leader, John Parker. “But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
Shots were fired, and eight of the minutemen were killed. By the time the British reached Concord, however, resistance had been better organized. At a bridge near one of the entrances to the town, British soldiers were attacked, and the fighting began in earnest.
Now facing hundreds of colonists who prudently stood behind trees and in houses and fired at the redcoats, the British soldiers beat a disorganized retreat to Boston. More than 250 British were dead, missing, or wounded, compared to about 90 Americans killed or wounded.
The war of words was over. The war of blood and death had begun.