PART I
2
Had Google Earth scanned North America in 1750, it would have displayed a scattering of settlements along the Atlantic coast. South of the continent’s northern tundra, in an area then controlled by the British Hudson’s Bay Company, it would have revealed small communities situated along the St. Lawrence River, inhabited by people of French ancestry. Heading southeast into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Google satellite would have spotted British and Acadian residents clustered along the shores of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. Swinging southward, larger British settlements would have come into view, beginning with the Massachusetts colony, which included present-day Maine, and continuing 1,200 miles south to Savannah, Georgia. Most of these residents, mainly of European birth or descent, lived within a hundred miles of the sea, with the densest communities located near bays, such as Chesapeake Bay, and navigable rivers—the Kennebec, Connecticut, and Delaware in the North and the Potomac, James, and Savannah in the South. Barely visible would be scattered pockets of settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains.
These aerial images would have detected a handful of denser settlements, all of which were port cities, including Boston, New York, and Charlestown, South Carolina. Philadelphia, the largest, had an estimated 34,000 residents in 1776. Baltimore, the sixth largest, was home to fewer than 6,000 souls. Google’s view of Boston would have shown one- and two-story structures on a small spit of land jutting into Boston Harbor. New Yorkers congregated on the lower reaches of Manhattan Island. The density of these eighteenth-century cities contrasted with the rural panorama of farms and villages scattered along the coastal plains. Most residents from Maine to Georgia were of British background. A small scattering of people resided beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys in lands claimed by France. Hundreds of miles to the west, across the grassland plains, rose the towering Rocky Mountains, although few European colonists knew of their existence in 1750. Euro-Americans were aware that the Pacific Ocean established the western border of North America. Hope still circulated that a water route across the continent existed. To the south of Georgia lay New Spain, with settlements around Santa Fe, New Mexico; in southern Texas; along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, including New Orleans; and at St. Augustine and other Florida locations. Spanish colonies also reached southward into Central America, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Spain, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands all had claims in the West Indies archipelago. Russia had a toehold in North America on the Alaskan coast.
Figure 2.1. Map of North America, circa 1750. This was probably based on Bowen’s 1747 map. Source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, control number 73694927.
Google Earth also would have spotted indigenous peoples. These Amerindians were divided into hundreds of tribes, spoke innumerable languages, and were spread over the entire continent, although few continued to live where Europeans were numerous. As Google’s eye in the sky panned the forest canopy stretching from the Mississippi to the eastern coastline, the largely treeless Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific coast, it would have noted swarms of wild animals, including bison, which ranged as far east as New York. It would have surveyed an immense land area with varied topographies and physical properties that played a pivotal role in shaping the American state.1
THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND NORTH AMERICA
Euro-American colonists of the 1750s did not have access to the internet, of course, but some of them owned maps and atlases. These works conspicuously displayed the territories of the powerful European states that had staked claims in the Americas. Britain had been particularly successful in acquiring international holdings and collecting them into an “empire,” a term in use during the eighteenth century. Besides its colonies in North America and the Caribbean, which included the islands of Barbados and Jamaica, Britain had established footholds in Central and South America, supported the ventures of the private East India Company in India, colonized Ireland, and fused Wales, Scotland, and England to form Great Britain. The impetus behind this imperial expansion was multifaceted and included a competitive rivalry with other states, a desire to enlarge Britain’s commercial radius, and the availability of its Royal Navy, a potent instrument of state power. By the seventeenth century the major European states had developed heavily armed oceangoing vessels, which afforded them military control over weaker regimes. Britain became the world’s naval superpower in the mid-eighteenth century, possessing 141 “ships of the line,” the battleships of their day.2
British immigrants in North America took pride in Great Britain’s naval prowess, which protected trade and commerce in the Atlantic region and guarded against advances from France and Spain, both ruled by Catholic monarchs. American colonists of English descent, virtually all of them Protestant, considered themselves loyal British subjects. Most took considerable pride in their British heritage, which entitled them to the customary rights of British subjects and protection by the king’s professional army and the Royal Navy.
Maintaining these forces was costly. The key to their funding was Britain’s capacity to raise money, first by establishing reliable revenue streams and second by borrowing when political-military crises increased the need for funds. Foreign and domestic trade played a prominent role in financing this system, with customs and excise taxes accounting for more than 70 percent of British tax revenue in the 1750s. One-fifth of the nation’s exports came from its thirteen North American colonies. Steady income meant good credit, so when additional funds were needed, such as during wartime emergencies, the ministry could turn to the Bank of England, founded in 1694, for loans. Britain’s naval might was based in large measure on a workable tax system and its creditworthiness.3
Settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, founded in the early seventeenth century, were Britain’s first North American possessions south of Nova Scotia. They eventually increased to thirteen colonies between Maine and Georgia. Their governors were appointed by British officials in the eight “royal” colonies and by proprietors in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania; governors were elected in the “charter” colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut. In all the colonies, with the exception of Massachusetts, governors appointed a council that functioned as a body of advisers and as the highest court in some cases. Governors had the power to veto legislation adopted by colonial assemblies, whose members were elected in all thirteen colonies. A Board of Trade in England had the authority to disallow laws passed in the colonies, a power it used sparingly. Most day-to-day civic business was undertaken by local governments, principally by towns in New England and the middle colonies and by counties in colonies south of Pennsylvania.
British officials saw their North American colonies primarily as economic adjuncts for the benefit of the home islands. The seventeenth century had given rise to mercantilism, a system that sought to enhance the nation’s economy through command controls. Britain’s primary interest in North America was to encourage the export of grains, forest products (including naval stores), and cattle, which it did by offering colonial producers access to British markets.4 The commercial monopolies granted to the British East India Company grew out of this approach. Beginning in 1651 Parliament enacted the Navigation Acts, which formulated mercantilist regulations for the empire’s colonies: exports were restricted to ships that had been built in Britain or America and had British crews; most imports into the colonies had to pass through Britain, as did most colonial exports; and manufactured products that competed with British businesses were prohibited. In the mid-eighteenth century Parliament tried to ban the colonial issue of paper money in an attempt to dampen inflation, which harmed British creditors.5
Though seemingly stringent on its face, British commercial policy was lax in practice. Administrative enforcement of commercial regulations was porous, and evasion of customs duties was widespread, especially in New England, which specialized in merchant shipping. Americans realized that Great Britain was a favored market for American products, which enjoyed protection by the Royal Navy while in transit. Few residents in British North America contested Parliament’s authority to regulate the Atlantic trade.
THE AMERICAN COLONIES
North Americans accepted the British commercial system because it added to their prosperity. Numerous factors contributed to the growing colonial economy, with the availability of productive land the first in importance. America’s colonial economy was based primarily on cultivated commodities such as wheat, tobacco, rice, cattle, and horses and the harvest of native products such as timber, beavers, and fish. Numerous Atlantic harbors aided marine activity, especially the shipment of products to other colonies, the West Indies, and Europe. Lacking was a sufficient workforce, which lured streams of migrants to North America. Newcomers played a major role in an economy that benefited from population growth.6 The thirteen colonies that became the United States grew from 250,000 non-native people in 1700 to ten times that number in 1775.
Land was the pivotal attraction. Preindustrial civilizations were resource-based, extractive communities where survival and advancement depended on planting and husbandry, harvesting natural products, and mining. Roughly 90 percent of the population in mid-eighteenth-century North America was sustained by agriculture or by harvesting nature’s bounty. Merchants, artisans, military personnel, and a few professionals, such as lawyers, were found mainly in the continent’s few cities and constituted a small fraction of the workforce. For most, the clearest path to economic security in the New World lay in landownership; they worked the land by their own sweat or that of slaves and tenants, or they held it for speculation.7
George Washington filled all these roles. As a Virginia planter (an agriculturalist with a large farm operation), he oversaw five working farms consisting of 5,000 acres on his Mount Vernon estate, initially acquired by inheritance and marriage. Washington also gained control of tens of thousands of additional acres in his native Virginia and throughout Pennsylvania, New York, and the Ohio River basin, obtained through grants for military service from Virginia governors and private purchases. He took considerable pains to protect these investments by evicting squatters and enhanced their value by supporting transportation ventures that made his frontier properties more accessible. Washington is an oversize example of a colonial planter-speculator; his vast landholdings and several hundred slaves made him one of the richest men in Virginia. Most colonists were modest farmers whose activities centered around a household economy; this was especially true in New England, where livelihoods depended on consuming the fruits of one’s labors and selling or bartering small surpluses in a personalized economy in which hard currency was scarce. Exceptions prevailed in the Hudson River valley of New York and in much of the region south of Pennsylvania, where comparatively large manors and plantations existed.8
Beyond its connection to personal fortunes, land formed the territorial foundation of preindustrial states. Their wealth depended heavily on expanding the spatial extent of the realm and encouraging its utilization. The powerhouses of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used their armies and navies to guard their homelands and their colonial territories from foreign encroachment. Land and history were integrally entwined in North America, where Britain confronted French, Spanish, and Dutch contestants and sometimes unaligned Native Americans. Colonial officials and residents saw the abundant, fertile land as an opportunity for expansion. The maps and atlases circulating in England and the colonies that displayed the vastness of the North American continent fed this vision.9
The land had a profound influence on the political outlooks of notable colonials such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. All four paid close attention to cartography. Atlases, almanacs, and geographies, largely printed in Britain, were widely available in mid-eighteenth-century America, where a high rate of literacy promoted geographic literature. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson had extensive cartographic collections. Adams urged the study of geography, and Jefferson had an avid interest in the geography of North America. The trans-Appalachian West was central in Jefferson’s vision of an “empire of liberty” populated by landowning farmers. With an eye on their own personal futures, Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington invested in western lands, as did most Virginia colonial legislators in the mid and late 1700s.10
Colonial maps fed the American fascination with lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Numerous colonials envisioned an expansive British civilization carved out of virgin forest. Benjamin Franklin had Henry Popple’s 1733 map of North America, which depicted the broad trans-Appalachian West, installed in the hall of the Pennsylvania Assembly. John Adams noted that the same map hung over the dais of the Massachusetts Assembly.11 This map and later cartographic renderings of North America encouraged a mentality that fused land, prosperity, and social stability into a sociopolitical portrait of the future. Franklin summarized the sentiment in a 1763 letter: “Here in America she [Great Britain] has laid a broad and strong foundation on which to erect the most beneficial and certain commerce, with the greatness and stability of her empire.” To St. Jean de Crevecoeur, a French cartographer turned New York farmer whose writings were used to promote land sales, the prospect of western agriculture was the basis for the “future glory of the United States.” If economic interest did not provide sufficient motivation to pursue these dreams, religion might: the book of Genesis instructed, “The Lord God took man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”12
Land did not sustain everyone. Shippers, seamen, and artisans worked in seaports such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Shipbuilding was a specialty of New Englanders. Besides importing and exporting goods, some merchants manufactured products, such as rum and iron bars. The colonies supported an impressive iron-making industry, which proved valuable during the American Revolution. Most locally consumed goods, such as cloth, leather, pewter, and milled grains, were handcrafted. Benjamin Franklin was a printer and papermaker, as well as assistant postmaster for the British colonies. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were attorneys. George Washington hired managers to oversee his Mount Vernon farms and retained a large staff of slaves and indentured servants to make garments, footwear, and metal goods. Planters commonly had side ventures or secondary occupations. Washington shipped agricultural products and fish from his wharf on the Potomac River; many Virginia planters also acted as merchants, attorneys, or public officials. Though nonfarmer occupations engaged only a fraction of the workforce, they provided important synergies for an economy based on the principles of capitalism and oriented around the availability of resources.
Work and culture varied across the landscape of colonial North America. Based on economic orientation, at least six regions are identifiable: household farming, fishing, and shipping in New England; the wheat culture of the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania); tobacco fields in the Chesapeake Bay area; rice and indigo plantations of the Carolinas and Georgia; and mixed farming regions in the backcountry, which shaded into a frontier zone of trade with Native Americans. Historical geographer D. W. Meinig adds Canada (Quebec and the Maritime Provinces) and the Spanish mission settlements in southern California to the list of distinguishable regional cultures in North America.
Economic regions tended to overlap cultural distinctions. New Englanders were primarily English transplants rooted in a Puritan-Congregational tradition that distinguished the region’s town life. The middle colonies contained a heterogeneous population of English, Scotch-Irish, German, and Dutch settlers, along with a smattering of Swedes. Pennsylvania contained a large German population, although Philadelphia was culturally diverse. Residents of the Virginia-Chesapeake region were largely English in nationality and Anglican in religion; social and economic power was lodged firmly in the hands of the largest planters. A similar social structure was found in the coastal communities of the Carolinas and Georgia, whose residents were largely of English origin. African Americans, nearly all of them slaves, lived primarily south of Pennsylvania. Farther inland, in the backcountry, the population was more ethnically diverse, with Scotch-Irish farmers often in the majority.13
Colonial identities tracked closely with the cultural and economic distinctions of North America. Besides their attachments to locality and colony, free inhabitants defined themselves by race, kinship, gender, religion, and class. There was no uniform American; a set of cultural layers sorted individuals into particular reference groups. But in every section of the British North American colonies, white male property owners were a distinct and privileged group that exercised paternal control over their properties, their children, nonwhites, and women. With the exception of Catholics in Maryland, colonial elites were Protestant. And, of critical significance in view of the geographic dispersion of colonial inhabitants, English was the dominant language of communication in British North America.
One other factor had great bearing on America’s future. Most residents of British North America, and especially colonial elites of both genders, considered themselves loyal British subjects, proud to proclaim their allegiance to the king of England. They admired the British Constitution for its limitations on the use of capricious power, considered English law their guiding principle and liberty their birthright, and, if their economic situation permitted, aped the cultural practices of the English aristocracy. Calling themselves British, colonial Americans were proud of their heritage and their membership in the British Empire.14
Paradoxically, this close identification with things British sowed seeds of colonial rebellion. As Bernard Bailyn has elegantly written, eighteenth-century British polemists saw politics as a perpetual struggle between power and liberty, laced with the suspicion that rulers would plot “conspiracy against the constitutional guarantees of liberty.” The political worldview of the British opposition literature, widely available in the colonies, primed Americans to detect conspiratorial intentions in the actions of royal ministers and to see threats to liberty lurking everywhere. Americans had developed a “frame of mind,” Bailyn writes, that made eighteenth-century colonial politics “latently revolutionary.”15
POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES
In theory, Parliament and the Crown possessed complete authority over the governance of British colonies. In practice, however, control of internal affairs in North America lay principally in the hands of its inhabitants, exercised through local institutions. The centers of this power were the colonial assemblies, which had been created early in the history of each of the colonies. The members of these representative bodies were elected in towns in New England, in counties from New York to North Carolina, and in parishes in South Carolina and Georgia. Although property qualifications limited the franchise, widespread ownership of land meant that a large majority of free adult males was eligible to cast ballots. Voters tended to select their lawmakers from wealthy families, often keeping local elites in office for numerous terms. This was especially the case in the southern colonies, and in Virginia virtually all members of the House of Burgesses considered themselves planters. Though democratic by international standards of the time, colonial politics was deferential to one’s economic “betters.”16
Mimicking Parliament, colonial representatives elected their own speaker, initiated legislation, determined membership qualifications, judged election results, and appointed committees. Over the years assemblies assumed a variety of critical powers, such as the authority to levy taxes and to appropriate monies, including the payment of governors’ salaries, as well as the authority to formulate policy over land, paper currency, defense, and other matters. Only the charters of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts specified annual sessions; in the other colonies, governors summoned and dissolved the legislatures. Despite the theoretical power of governors and the English Board of Trade to disallow legislation, colonial lawmakers viewed their institutions as “little parliaments,” largely autonomous and free from British interference. Elected by their constituents, armed with important powers, and ready to defend their authority as a birthright of English constitutionalism, the colonial assemblies became “the most important institutions in colonial politics.”17
Local governments handled most day-to-day civic matters. These tasks fell to towns in New England (Massachusetts had 194 towns in 1765); all freemen were permitted to participate in town meetings and elect selectmen. The county was the local administrative body in the South. In Virginia, which had forty-five counties plus four boroughs in 1752, each county was supervised by a county clerk, sheriff, coroner, surveyor, tobacco inspector, customs collector, and naval inspector; some functions were assigned to Anglican Church officials (vestrymen) and justices of the peace in subcounty units called parishes.
The key tasks of local officials were tax collection, defense, and criminal justice. New England communities imposed poll taxes on free adult males and taxed real estate and personal property based on its value. Sometimes additional revenue was raised by lotteries. Virginia levied poll taxes on both free males and slaves of both sexes, taxed imports and exports, and occasionally imposed a property tax. All colonies charged fees for various services, often paid in kind. In cash-starved Virginia, tobacco functioned as a substitute for monetary compensation. Local governments received the greatest share of tax revenue, which funded the salaries of officials, paid for the maintenance of churches and the improvement of roads and bridges, and provided aid to the indigent. New England used public monies to maintain schools.18
American colonists exercised coercive force in two significant ways: for the maintenance of a militia and the administration of criminal justice. Every colony assigned all able-bodied men to a militia unit whose primary function was defense, such as repelling attacks by Indians. But equally important, militias served as manpower pools from which to recruit volunteers for more sustained campaigns. Colonial legislatures appropriated funds to pay these volunteers. Citizen-soldiers, most of whom lacked full employment in a cash-strapped economy, welcomed the income. Local governments relied on sheriffs and justices of the peace to enforce the criminal code, which matched stringent British law. Lacking prisons and defense attorneys, local courts wasted little time in sentencing individuals convicted of theft, forgery, arson, and adultery to the gallows. Designed to emphasize “what the state could do to those who broke the law,” hangings were public ceremonies that often attracted hundreds or even thousands of onlookers.19
Two additional functions suggest the range of powers exercised by local colonial governments. Children born to individuals of British birth or ancestry were automatically British subjects, but immigrants had to apply for such status. Colonists favored granting this status because it attracted settlers, adding to the workforce. Yet at the same time, colonists adopted a strict ethnocentric sense of identity by excluding slaves and free blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, and women from becoming British subjects. Citizenship, which was the basis for political rights, was confined (outside of Maryland) to adult white male Protestant property owners.20 Assisting the poor was another local responsibility. In Virginia parishes, Anglican clergy administered aid to poor whites but not to slaves. In New England towns, public support for the indigent was only part of a more comprehensive approach to community well-being. Massachusetts towns, for example, “warned out” nonresident males in an effort to protect the local labor force from competition. They also removed “orphans” from families deemed unable or unwilling to properly discipline or educate their children, relocating them to households that, in the opinion of town selectmen, would provide an upbringing that comported with community standards. These policies were emblematic of New England’s close scrutiny of communities’ social and economic behavior.21
CRISIS IN THE EMPIRE
In 1754 Colonel George Washington, just twenty-two years old, led a militia regiment from northern Virginia toward Pittsburgh. Virginia’s governor had instructed the young officer to occupy a British fort under construction at Pittsburgh, with the intent of blocking the advance of the French, who sought to gain control of an area around the forks of the Ohio River. But the French beat them to the fort and sent a delegation to negotiate with the approaching Virginians. A firefight resulted, and Washington’s group killed twelve French soldiers whose mission had been diplomacy, not battle. Fearing the appearance of enemy reinforcements, the Virginians withdrew to a makeshift barricade (“Fort Necessity”), where a large French contingent forced Washington’s surrender. The defeated colonel was allowed to take the remnants of his regiment back over the mountains to Virginia. The skirmish in the wilderness became the opening round of the French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). This clash between imperial titans, wrote historian Bernard DeVoto, was “a war that changed the world.”22
The Seven Years’ War was the fourth in a series of military encounters between Great Britain and France and their respective allies during the eighteenth century. At stake was control of North America and other colonial outposts and the balance of power among the major European states. Because France fielded a huge army in its continental struggle against Prussia, which was allied with Britain, the Bourbon regime had few troops to defend its North American territory in the 1750s. Britain, in contrast, sent a force to America that vastly outnumbered the French and used its powerful navy to block French and Spanish fleets at strategic locations in the Caribbean, along the coast of France, and elsewhere. The British regular army, aided by regiments of colonial volunteers, defeated the French at Louisbourg (on Cape Breton Island in Canada), took Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, and defeated the French garrison at Quebec (1759). A year later Montreal fell to the British, crushing French control of the St. Lawrence River–Great Lakes region. In the Treaty of 1763 France ceded its North American holdings (present-day Canada) to Great Britain.
As history would later demonstrate, Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War was a Pyrrhic victory. Thirteen years after the Treaty of 1763, the thirteen colonies declared their independence. The roots of this separation can be found in the “global war between European great powers” that enlarged British debt and aggravated American irritation over Britain’s remedies for its financial burden.23 The disagreement began over taxation. Britain had borrowed heavily to fund its military campaign in the Seven Years’ War. To finance its debt, Britain adopted new revenue measures such as the Sugar Act of 1764, designed in part to force colonists to contribute to the costs of defending them from France. The new levies included customs duties on imports to America, as well as restrictions on exports to England and tighter customs administration, which sought to reduce revenue losses due to smuggling. The Royal Navy was enlisted to catch customs cheaters. This new British toughness was driven in part by resentment over the colonies’ minimal contribution to the fight against France and by a severe economic recession, which increased the pressure on British taxpayers. Britain also tightened its ban on paper currency in the colonies, which Americans had issued to ease the economic stress of the recession. Even more galling, in light of past practices, Britain stationed soldiers in the colonies and required the colonies to house them. This new intrusion into colonial affairs was alarming, especially to the Massachusetts Assembly, which created a committee of correspondence that urged the colonies to protest by boycotting British goods.
The second issue that sparked discord between the British and North Americans concerned western lands. After the French and Indian War, Americans ventured over the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio River valley in search of land. Native Americans resisted this penetration, attacking the “trespassers.” The conflict erupted into Pontiac’s War (1763–1764), which highlighted the administrative entanglements of managing the frontier. Britain’s solution was to prohibit new European settlement west of the Appalachians, announced in the Proclamation of 1763. The order incensed colonials who owned or coveted western lands. George Washington ignored the order, which he correctly predicted would fail. Restrictions on colonial entrepreneurial mobility, coupled with the new tax regime, upset the peaceful coexistence that had characterized British-American relations in the past.
These irritations ignited further conflict. Rather than back down from its new revenue policy, Britain passed the Stamp Act of 1765, which placed duties on ordinary items such as newspapers and legal documents. The Stamp Act triggered the first of three political crises, each of which forged greater intercolony cooperation and provoked philosophic-legal discussions about the relationship between Britain and its colonies. Protesters calling themselves the Sons of Liberty organized in port cities and looted the homes of stamp collectors, many of whom resigned. Delegates from nine colonies met in New York and adopted resolutions that rejected Britain’s authority to impose taxes directly on American colonists. Although the delegates pledged allegiance to the Crown and accepted Parliament’s authority to set policy for the empire, in the next breath they proclaimed that “his Majesty’s liege subjects . . . are entitled to all the inherent rights and liberties of his natural born subjects.” Americans, in other words, had the same rights as inhabitants of England and therefore could not be taxed without their consent—an impossibility, given their lack of representation in Parliament. British lawmakers repealed the Stamp Act but used the occasion to reaffirm their authority to make laws for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
The abrupt change in British policy provoked coordinated resistance from Americans, which was met in turn by Parliament’s assertion that colonists could not second-guess British governance. The events of 1765 initiated a descent into crisis. Parliament enacted the Townshend Duties in 1767, which colonists resisted by supporting nonimportation agreements. Britain repealed the duties in 1770, but not before sending British soldiers to Boston, the hotbed of resistance to British authority. In 1772 Britain decided to pay royal colonial officials directly, so they would no longer be beholden to colonial legislatures for their salaries. The next year Parliament allowed the British East India Company to sell tea in the colonies without paying customs duties, which gave it an economic advantage over colonial importers. A mob of Bostonians raided East India Company ships and dumped their tea into the harbor. New Yorkers held their own tea protest. For the British ministry and a majority in Parliament, the Boston Tea Party was the last straw in what they saw as the breakdown of law and order in the colonies. Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts (the Intolerable Acts, to colonists) in 1774. These laws closed the port of Boston until the dumped tea had been paid for, revoked Massachusetts residents’ right to hold town meetings, and protected British soldiers and magistrates from colonial trials. A final act suspended the Massachusetts legislature. British officials had flexed their muscles, terminating citizen governance in Massachusetts.
The more public dimension of this conflict took the form of parliamentary decisions and colonial opposition to them through street protests and organized boycotts of British products. A second and equally influential manifestation of this “cousins’ dispute” was a debate over law and constitutionalism. As Jack Greene has shown, the metropolitan government (in England) and colonial publicists—usually lawyers, legislators, and educated observers—produced a flurry of writings that interpreted and illuminated the legal position of the colonies. Each side began with opposing premises and reached different conclusions. The British interpretation argued that Parliament had omnipotent authority over the British Empire. Constitutional authority could not be fragmented among parts of the realm but must be centered in one location—namely, the monarchy and the national legislature. To deny Parliament’s authority to tax was tantamount to denying its unicentric control of British governance.24
The colonists responded that the British Constitution limited the power of Parliament, which had never been authorized to legislate the internal affairs of each colony. Through usage and custom, the British Constitution had evolved to recognize and accept the rights and practices exercised by colonists in their “little parliaments.” Given this history of “directing their internal Government by Laws made with their Consent,” Richard Bland, a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, argued in 1766 that each colony was “a distinct State, independent as to the internal Government,” but united to Britain’s “external Polity.” In essence, the colonies had evolved into “pure Republic[s].” To this, British leaders responded that the colonies were bound to “the sovereign power” of Great Britain and that it was “an absurdity” to claim that the Crown had created a series of “independent state[s].” As Greene makes clear, the question of how power was apportioned between colonial peripheries and the metropolitan center raged unanswered throughout the eighteenth century. What changed in the years between the seventeenth century and the Seven Years’ War was the rise of parliamentary government in Great Britain and the insistence of American colonists that British subjects possessed constitutional rights.25
Little changed in the debate over the reach of Parliament’s power between 1763 and 1774, but what did change were events on the ground. In 1774 Parliament enacted the Quebec Act, which extended the territorial domain of French Canada southward to the Ohio River and westward to the Mississippi, retained Catholicism as the established church of the western province, and denied an elected legislature to govern the region. New Englanders were aghast at this embrace of “popery.” That same year, a further affront to colonial self-reliance was the assignment of General George Gage, commander of British military forces in North America, to Boston, where he replaced the civil governor and established martial law. In response to this crisis, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies assembled in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress. The group ratified Boston’s Suffolk Resolves, which outlined resistance to British martial law, including the recommendation that the colony prepare to counter British militarism with an armed defense. Gage then dissolved the Massachusetts legislature, and New Englanders began stockpiling guns and drilling their militia.26
CONCLUSION: THE EMERGENCE OF LITTLE REPUBLICS
The First Continental Congress had little difficulty summarizing the philosophical core of the colonists’ constitutional position with regard to their place in the British Empire. It stated that the inhabitants of the English colonies in North American “are entitled to life, liberty, and property,” which could not be ceded “to any sovereign power . . . without their consent.” Citing the key mechanism for exercising this prerogative, the declaration stated: “That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council.” The delegates reminded Britain that the colonies held no seats in Parliament and that some of their “little parliaments” had been dissolved and replaced by appointed councils, an action that was “unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the freedom of American legislation.” Between 1763 and 1774 Americans had honed their conception of their rights as English subjects and the law concerning the division of power between the center and the peripheries of the empire.
Americans’ embrace of their rights should be seen in the context of the colonies’ evolution during the eighteenth century. This exercise in self-government transformed each colony into a “little republic” possessing virtually all the powers of a national state, except for diplomacy and foreign trade. Colonial governments levied taxes and appropriated these monies largely at their own discretion. Colonies possessed coercive power through their militias and local officials such as sheriffs and justices of the peace. Their courts heard arguments over property conflicts, including the ownership of slaves, and convicted and sentenced persons for offenses deemed criminal by colonial statute (including imposing the death penalty). Colonies had formulated a legal-philosophical rationale, based largely on British political-legal precedent, that established a constitutional justification for self-government. As Greene characterizes this history, American colonists “engaged in state building.”27
Neither the majority in Parliament nor British ministers accepted the American argument that Britain’s power to rule the empire had limits. To English officials, power held at the center was not divisible. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, this decision looks like a horrible miscalculation. How could British leaders let such a valuable asset as North America slip through their fingers? Why did they ignore the advice of both members of Parliament and colonists like the respected Benjamin Franklin to accept some sort of compromise rather than cling so dogmatically to a political theory that drove Americans to insurrection?
British intransigence is not easily explained, but one can speculate about the mind-set of British leaders. Perhaps most important, they understood that if the central regime could not impose taxes on all residents in its realm, the state lacked full control over them. Underscoring this axiom was the reality that Britain had fought a costly war against its archenemy France and had invested sizable sums to achieve victory. The evidence also suggests that British officials focused their geopolitical strategy more on the balance of power in Europe than on their relationship with North Americans.28 Additionally, many in Great Britain resented the colonists’ failure to appreciate Britain’s costly campaign to drive the hated French from North America. Moreover, British governors had complained for decades about tendencies toward anarchy and independence in the colonies.29 Contributing to this mix of likely motivations affecting British decisionmaking was a lack of reliable information about conditions in America. British military officers, for example, took a contemptuous view of American military capacity, misunderstanding the tradition of a local militia.30
Yet perhaps the root cause of British stubbornness was simply their hubris, which stemmed in good measure from the aristocratic background of the English ruling class. The role of British rulers in the late eighteenth century was to maintain, not reduce, the power of their state. National leaders seldom voluntarily relinquished power, especially to people they regarded as ungrateful and insubordinate. Rather than seeing the dispute with the colonies as a legal-political disagreement that could be negotiated, British leaders saw insurrection and resolved to crush it. Thus a grand paradox ensued, wherein one of history’s most liberal states pursued a pathway that led to a separate and more powerful state.