Among the Powers of the Earth

Eliga H. Gould

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

For most Americans, the Revolution's main achievement is summed up by the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yet far from a straightforward attempt to be free of Old World laws and customs, the American founding was also a bid for inclusion in the community of nations as it existed in 1776. America aspired to diplomatic recognition under international law and the authority to become a colonizing power itself.As Eliga Gould shows in this reappraisal of American history, the Revolution was an international transformation of the first importance. To conform to the public law of Europe's imperial powers, Americans crafted a union nearly as centralized as the one they had overthrown, endured taxes heavier than any they had faced as British colonists, and remained entangled with European Atlantic empires long after the Revolution ended.No factor weighed more heavily on Americans than the legally plural Atlantic where they hoped to build their empire. Gould follows the region's transfiguration from a fluid periphery with its own rules and norms to a place where people of all descriptions were expected to abide by the laws of Western Europe—"civilized" laws that precluded neither slavery nor the dispossession of Native Americans.

CHAPTER 1

On the Margins of Europe

ON THE MORNING OF September 11, 1755, nearly three hundred British soldiers, most of them New England provincials under the command of Colonel John Winslow of Massachusetts, began loading groups of boys onto five ships anchored in Minas Basin, just south of the isthmus where Nova Scotia joins the North American mainland. The boys, some as young as ten, were part of a larger body of “French neutrals,” or Acadians, being held in the village’s Catholic churchyard. They and their families stood accused of abetting Britain’s enemies in its undeclared war with France.1

Winslow did not relish the terms of his commission. Veteran of the Cartagena and Cape Breton expeditions of the 1740s and New England’s most celebrated soldier, he told the Acadians that he found his task as “disagreeable … as I know it must be grievous to you who are of the same species.”2 If so, Winslow’s feelings made no difference to the individuals in his custody. At first the boys refused to “go without their Fathers.” But upon seeing the soldiers advance with fixed bayonets, they reluctantly “went off praying, singing and crying, being met by the women and children all the way.” In all, over two thousand people left Minas, part of an estimated out-migration of seven thousand from western Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy. After the last transport sailed, Winslow’s men torched both the village and the surrounding countryside.3

The Acadian removal, which aimed at nothing less than the displacement of an entire population and way of life, has long occupied a special place in the catalog of British imperial atrocities, most famously in the story of the star-crossed lovers in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline. According to an account in the French Mercure de La Haye, Winslow’s soldiers “burned and destroyed [the Acadians’] houses, barns, farms and villages; their farm animals [were] driven into the woods where anyone who likes can take possession of them.” “Thus,” the correspondent wrote, “one of the most beautiful countries in the world is now ravaged and empty.”4 While proclaiming the removal’s justness, British and American writers also noted the suffering that it caused. In Massachusetts, which received the largest number of refugees, Thomas Hutchinson was so moved by “the fatal Necessity of their Distress” that he took a woman, her four sons, and a grandson into his house.5 Because they were shipped to places as distant as Europe and the West Indies—Britain’s colonies on the North American seaboard all received exiles, as did England, France, and, eventually, Louisiana—it is hard to say how many died. If we include families who escaped by fleeing to the woods of Nova Scotia and the adjacent islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the best guess is that disease, starvation, and exposure together claimed around ten thousand lives.6

The operation that caused this tragedy was obviously an act of war, a nasty prologue to the conflagration that engulfed Europe and the rest of the world in 1756. In fighting that would spread as far as India and the Philippines, Britain vanquished the arms of both France and, ultimately, Spain, making its overseas empire, by some reckonings, the most extensive since the fall of Rome. Because of the unprecedented commitment of British blood and treasure, the Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War, as the North American theater of the war is sometimes called, had particularly far-reaching implications for London’s involvement in colonial governance and administration. In America the effects included expanding the navy’s presence in the Caribbean, sending the army to serve in large numbers in North America for the first time in British history, and setting the stage for Parliament’s ill-fated attempts at imperial reform during the 1760s and 1770s. Surveying the war in America in 1759, the English agronomist Arthur Young wrote that Britain appeared to be “turning over quite a new leaf in that part of the world,” resolving its differences with Europe’s other colonial powers “with the greatest nicety” and taking a more active role in the affairs of its own subjects.7 Although these efforts were just starting to bear fruit, the determination to strengthen Britain’s imperial power was already manifest in the ruthlessness with which Winslow’s soldiers carried out their orders.

If it foreshadowed a more assertive British presence, however, the Acadian expulsion was also the product of a very different history. Although reminiscent of the duke of Cumberland’s pacification of the Scottish Highlands in 1746, the fighting in Nova Scotia occurred in a region that was, at best, imperfectly integrated into the system of treaties that Europe’s colonial powers used in relations with each other in Europe.8 Not only were the Acadians effectively a people without a nation,9 full subjects of neither Britain nor France, but they inhabited a borderland that lacked clear, internationally recognized boundaries. Significantly, when the last transport set sail in December 1755, Britain and France were still legally at peace. As such, the removal underscored the limits of European law and diplomacy throughout eastern North America and the extent to which places like Nova Scotia were on Europe’s margins. In the retrospective words of Edmund Burke’s Annual Register, the Seven Years’ War—the first truly global war in European history—had its origins in a series of local disputes that had long seemed too unimportant “to call for a very laborious discussion” in Europe.10 In a sense, Winslow’s New Englanders and the boys of Minas were participants in two different wars: one driven by the increasingly global ambitions of Britain and France, the other the irregular, low-grade conflicts that had historically characterized relations between the rivals’ subjects and allies in America. Each would play a crucial role in shaping the world that Americans inherited in 1776.

(1)

In both Europe and America, people often claimed that a distinguishing feature of European war and diplomacy was a propensity to temper the quest for power with the rule of law. According to the Protestant Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations first appeared in French in 1758 and was probably the best-known treatise on the subject in America at the time of the revolution, the willingness of Europe’s rulers to base their relations with each other on mutually agreed treaties and customs made it possible to think of Europe as a sort of “republic”: a law-bound community of nations, as Vattel conceived it, whose members were united by “ties of common interest” and a shared commitment to “order and liberty.”11 Despite the insular, xenophobic strands of Georgian patriotism, even Britons sometimes spoke of Europe in such terms, describing it as a zone of law and civility—“the most civilized Quarter of the Globe,” as an English pamphleteer wrote during the 1740s.12 For many people, Europe’s respect for the international rule of law was an important part of what it meant to live in a modern, enlightened age. “Europe hath for above a century past been greatly enriched by commerce and polished by arts,” observed East Apthorp, the American-born vicar of Croydon, of what he took to be the prevailing trend in 1776. “Whoever compares the present age with the last, will discern an almost total change to have taken place in the manners, the customs, and the government of Christendom.”13

Of course the Europe to which Apthorp referred was a republic in only the loosest, most general sense of the word. Because neither the Roman Catholic Church nor Europe’s secular rulers had the capacity to force other nations to accept any one particular version of the law, Europeans interacted in an arena that lacked a common sovereign or an overarching legal authority. What Europe did have was a system of treaties, two of which—the treaties of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, and Utrecht, which brought the European wars against France’s Louis XIV to a close in 1713—had proved so durable that they had become a kind of public law. In Britain and Ireland this treaty-based law was widely credited with shielding the kingdoms’ Protestants from the universal claims of the Catholic Church, as well as strengthening the constitutional rights that Parliament secured when it offered the English Crown to William and Mary in 1689 and the union with Scotland in 1707. Because the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht also protected the liberties of Britain’s neighbors, Catholic as well as Protestant, the effect was to give friends and enemies alike a reason to recognize each other’s rights and to comport themselves in ways that were consistent with their agreements with other nations. This meant that wars between Europe’s rulers, no matter how frequent they were or how long the fighting lasted, tended to be finite and limited, which combatants waged not for total victory or universal dominion but for goals that they believed their rivals would recognize in a peace treaty at the war’s end.14 Also, because the end of war was peace, governments at war had an interest in maintaining the rule of law. Writing in 1752, David Hume claimed that Europe’s foreign wars had lost much “of their cruelty” as a result of these checks and balances, and belligerents had learned once their wars were over to “divest themselves of the brute and resume the man.”15 War, it seemed, had become the exception and peace the norm.

Then, as now, critics were quick to note that this image did not begin to capture the full reality of European warfare or the limited protections that European treaties often afforded people caught in its path. Because the law of nations only applied to things that treaty-worthy sovereigns did in the course of their interactions with each other, the acts of honor and humanity that rulers performed in its name were usually reserved for the regular forces of contending governments, not rebels, pirates, or, when they violated international agreements, civilians. To look no further than the duke of Cumberland’s pacification of the Scottish Highlands in 1746, British forces committed horrific acts of violence without violating what they took to be the customary rules of war, let alone the conviction of apologists that their behavior was justified.16 During the winter of 1757 and 1758, the German principality of Hanover, which George II ruled as a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire, experienced the full brunt of such tactics after the king repudiated a convention promising to withdraw the electorate from Britain’s war with France. Claiming that the laws of war “authorized” him to retaliate against the Hanoverians for George II’s failure to honor the convention, the duc de Richelieu, commander of the French army, allowed the soldiers under his command to loot and burn those areas that they occupied. Although Richelieu acknowledged the extraordinary nature of what he was doing and claimed that it was contrary to “the natural humanity of the French nation,” as well as his own “personal character,” he warned—accurately, as it turned out—that the destruction would not be limited to the king’s personal estates but would include every town and village, “without sparing the smallest cabin.”17 In neighboring Hesse-Cassel, which Richelieu’s soldiers also occupied but did not loot, the late 1750s produced the lowest birth and highest death rates of the eighteenth century, and farms and villages across Hanover were in ruins at the war’s end.18

As the fate of Hanover and the Scottish Highlands suggests, Europe’s treaty-based law was as much an instrument of war as it was of peace, and the need to uphold it formed an important part of the ethos of professional soldiers across Europe. In keeping with this, writers tended to differentiate the systematic violence of regular combatants—including, when the victims had broken an international agreement, against civilians—from violence that occurred without official sanction and to blame the worst excesses of war on mercenaries, privateers, and irregulars over whom European governments often had limited control. When allegations surfaced that the French had clubbed to death wounded English prisoners at the battle of Fontenoy in the Austrian Netherlands in 1745, a writer responded in the British press not by denying the charges but by blaming auxiliary units of Balkan pandours “and a few other Irregulars in French Pay,” who allegedly killed their enemies before France’s regulars “had Time to preserve them.”19 In his memoir of the Seven Years’ War, the British army officer Sir Charles Hotham took a similar approach to French atrocities in Germany, praising the “humanity and benevolence” of officers who kept their troops in order and attributing the worst infractions to French partisans and to defeated and, often, disorganized and ill-disciplined regulars.20 In the controversies that periodically swirled around the maintenance of a standing army in Britain, writers used similar terms to defend the king’s own forces. “The Duty of a Soldier is honourable and honest,” insisted the author of a British drill manual in 1756. “The Army despises those brave Indiscreets, who make their Valour Consist in doing Actions of Violence and Brutality. None are distinguished, none honored, none recompenced but the man of Worth, who regulates his Duty by Religion, Humanity, and Justice.”21

The result was a system that encouraged belligerents to think of war and the rule of law as mutually reinforcing categories. In the case of the time-honored right of occupying forces to “live off the land,” eighteenth-century armies turned what had often been a license to plunder into a system of requisitioning supplies and contributions. In Germany and the Netherlands, military commissaries adopted the practice of negotiating treaties with local magistrates, whereby they agreed to refrain from forcible takings in exchange for payments that were not to exceed the district’s peacetime revenue and officers undertook to discipline soldiers who violated such agreements by foraging on their own.22 Often, the raising of contributions still carried the threat of violence. Upon entering Dutch territory in 1747, the colonel of France’s Breton Volunteers threatened to visit several towns “with a Torch in my Hand” unless they supplied his troops with hay, oats, and straw, and it was well known that even well-regulated soldiers posed a heightened risk for crimes of all sorts, including theft, rape, and murder.23 Yet because armies that rejected plunder in favor of treaties could raise larger supplies and devote fewer resources to maintaining order, they had an interest in recognizing distinctions between seizures that were necessary and those that were not, between public and private property, and between individuals who actively assisted the enemy and those who did not. In this spirit, France agreed to reimburse the neutral principality of Liége for expenses incurred during its invasion of the Netherlands in 1746, and it paid local villagers two and a half million florins, or two-fifths of the occupation’s total cost, after the war was over.24 No doubt with such agreements in mind the political economist Adam Smith told his students at Glasgow University: “When the Netherlands is the seat of war all the peasants grow rich.”25 Though speaking tongue...