Resisting Independence

Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic

Brad A. Jones

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501754012
• eBook ISBN: 9781501754036
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In Resisting Independence, Brad A. Jones maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities—New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland—Jones argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. This compelling account reimagines Loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies.

Jones reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task—to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire.

Resisting Independence describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of Loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

CHAPTER 1

A Body Politic

Newspapers, Networks, and the Making of a Nation

In October 1756, the printer Daniel Fowle devoted almost half of the second issue of his newspaper, the New Hampshire Gazette, to an essay on the advantages of printing and the press.¹ Fowle described “the Art of Printing … [as] one of the most useful Inventions the World has ever seen,” for it had enlightened individuals and freed them from the tyranny of governments. If absent, he warned, “the common People [are] deprived of all the Means of Knowledge, and taught nothing but what qualifies them to acquiesce under the most abject Slavery.” Absolutist monarchs, Fowle continued, knew full well that a free and open press “was an admirable Instrument of promoting Knowledge, and … would prove the Bane of that absolute Authority, that inhuman Tyranny practiced by them.”

Fowle contended that “Weekly Mercuries,” or newspapers, offered the most immediate and accessible check to those in power. He compared newspapers to the human body’s circulatory system, arguing that they “keep the Body Politic (if not alive, at least) in sound Health,” through the “speedy Communication of the State of Affairs, from one part of the World to another, that easy Intercourse maintain’d between the different Parts of a Kingdom.” This observation was true of Britain’s far-flung empire, he believed, where this circulation of news and information allowed subjects to stay abreast of events occurring far beyond their own towns and villages.

According to Fowle, newspapers were also capable of enlightening readers of all rank in society, regardless of wealth, status, or proximity to the nation’s capital. “By this Means Knowledge is spread even among the Common People,” he insisted, “a useful Curiosity is rais’d in their Minds, their attention is rous’d, their Minds are enlarged, their Views extended.” Through the regular reading of newspapers, a diverse British Atlantic public was drawn into an imperial political culture that encouraged subjects to see themselves, “not in that contracted View they did … but in a more useful Light, as Members of a large Society … whose particular Welfare is in many Respects blended with the whole.”²

Newspapers, more than anything else, helped to integrate the vast British Atlantic.³ Reports and editorials appearing in the dozens of “Weekly Mercuries” carried by ships crisscrossing the ocean gave meaning to an emerging, shared understanding of loyalty and Loyalism among the ocean’s many and varied British inhabitants. Newspapers were especially useful in generating what one historian has called a “currency of political exchange” by giving textual existence to nonliterary events, such as riots, protests, and celebrations. Local political occurrences could now achieve supralocal significance and meaning, helping to shape a broader British Atlantic political culture.⁴ This point was not lost on Daniel Fowle. Later in his 1756 essay he argued that reading about events that took place beyond one’s local community “brings Men by Degrees to consider themselves as Neighbours and Fellow citizens with all Mankind. The Transition in our thoughts from others to our selves, is natural and easy; and we can’t avoid imagining … that the Adversities which happen to others, may meet us too.” The movement of information along developing local, regional, and imperial communication networks fostered an imagined community of subjects around a common national identity.⁵

Formed in the pages of the many “Weekly Mercuries” read, discussed, and debated by subjects throughout the North Atlantic, this shared understanding of Britishness drew on Protestant subjects’ deeply held fears of their nation’s long-standing Catholic enemies, France and Spain. Stories, both real and imagined, regularly described the alleged cruelty and despotism of these Catholic nations to encourage inhabitants of these four communities, and Britons elsewhere for that matter, to think of themselves as part of a progressively freer, wealthier, Protestant nation. This language of loyalty, of Britishness, enabled a distant population of subjects to see themselves as “Members of a large Society … whose particular Welfare is in many Respects blended with the whole.”

Britons living in these four North Atlantic port cities were especially receptive to this narrative, not least because they lived in such close proximity to their nation’s many enemies. Haligonians were surrounded on three sides by Indian societies previously allied with France and a smaller Acadian population that still haunted many of the town’s residents. New Yorkers worried, too, about the combined threat of Indian and French-Canadian enemies who might descend on the city via Lake Champlain and the North River.⁶ Kingstonians also lived among and around their nation’s greatest rivals, who regularly threatened invasion and were often thought to have instigated the many slave uprisings that occurred on the island.⁷ Even Glaswegians, though far more secure than Britons living in the other three communities, were near the center of the twice-failed Jacobite uprisings and living among an increasing number of Highlanders who relocated to their city in the 1750s.⁸ The city and towns along the Clyde River were also thought to be likely destination points for invading French armies in the first half of the eighteenth century. When they read in their local newspapers of the dangers of their Catholic foes, the inhabitants of these four communities would have certainly understood “that the Adversities which happen to others, may meet us too.”

The makings of Fowle’s “Body Politic,” however, depended on reliable Atlantic communication networks, a circulatory system capable of carrying news quickly and regularly to all corners of Britain’s vast empire. The establishment of a government-sponsored packet service during the Seven Years’ War strengthened communication between the colonies and the metropole, but information traveled best within a far more robust and complex system of local and regional networks. News of national importance was thus filtered through these more immediate webs of contact, which played a significant role in shaping distinctive local political cultures and identities in places like New York City, Glasgow, Halifax, and Kingston. During the many wars fought against France and Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholic rhetoric was able to overshadow divisions within the empire, providing a language of national unity that was so intentionally broad as to appeal to the nation’s diverse inhabitants. But in the absence of these wars and these enemies, as was the case for much of the 1760s and 1770s, subjects in these communities struggled to understand what exactly united them as Britons.

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By the 1750s, the British Atlantic was awash in a sea of print. Newspapers and other forms of print flooded cities, towns, and villages throughout mainland Britain, the Caribbean, and North America. Londoners, of course, enjoyed the largest and most accessible newspaper industry, while provincial printers on both sides of the ocean often published verbatim articles taken from metropolitan newspapers.⁹ The provincial press, however, was more than a mere extension of London’s printing industry. Local publishers had a wide variety of sources to draw from, including local and regional newspapers, personal letters, and locally written essays and editorials. These publishers also had access to newspapers and printed matter brought by ships from more distant communities across the empire.¹⁰

A vibrant and growing provincial and colonial printing industry helped to level the playing field with subjects living in London.¹¹ By the late 1760s, provincial English newspapers numbered in the thirties, while there were nearly thirty newspapers published in British North America and more than a half dozen in both Scotland and the British Caribbean.¹² On the eve of the American Revolution, Britons living in the most remote corners of the empire read, discussed, and debated ideas and events published in their local gazettes just as readily and enthusiastically as their compatriots in the nation’s capital.

Several factors contributed to the significant growth of the printing industry in the first half of the eighteenth century. A dramatic surge in the British population led to port cities emerging as regional and national centers of importance, not just in terms of trade and commerce, but also as points of contact along a complex transatlantic information network.¹³ New York City and Glasgow, for example, were sparsely populated provincial port towns at the turn of the eighteenth century. Fewer than 5,000 inhabitants called New York City home, while roughly 18,000 Scots lived in Glasgow. Six decades later, however, New York’s population had quadrupled to over 20,000 people, while Glasgow’s had nearly doubled to roughly 30,000.¹⁴ Even smaller port cities like Halifax and Kingston experienced some growth during this period, especially in relation to their colony’s population. Nearly half of Jamaica’s 13,000 white inhabitants lived in Kingston by the start of the American war, while several thousand of Nova Scotia’s roughly 20,000 inhabitants called Halifax home in the early 1770s.¹⁵ These port cities served as crucial information gateways both to the surrounding communities and with other regions of Britain’s ever-expanding Atlantic empire.

Imperial wars with Britain’s longtime European rivals also helped to expand the printing industry in these communities. The War of the Spanish Succession and that of the Austrian Succession, followed by the Great War for Empire in the 1750s, threatened Britain’s valuable Atlantic trade routes and often forced Caribbean and North American colonists to take up arms in defense of the Crown. In doing so, colonial subjects acted as agents of the state, playing a critical role in the formal expansion of their empire.

These wars forced Britons to take up their pens, too. The very act of imperial expansion required explanation. If subjects across the North Atlantic were expected to participate in the nation-building process—to risk their lives and livelihoods in defense of the state—they needed a narrative, a shared cause, to rally around. Scholars have emphasized the power of print in shaping national identities. “Acts of war,” argues one scholar, “generate acts of narration … [which] are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples.”¹⁶ For eighteenth-century Britons, wartime stories printed and reprinted in newspapers across the North Atlantic enabled a diverse and distant populace to find common ground, to imagine themselves as part of something greater, and to commit themselves to a vision of empire distinguished from that of their rivals in Europe.

These narratives, however, depended on reliable communication networks, which struggled to keep pace with Britain’s rapidly expanding empire in the first half of the eighteenth century. Until the Postal Act of 1711, there existed no imperial postal system by which Britons on both sides of the ocean could easily and regularly send letters or exchange newspapers. And even after the passage of that act, networks within Britain, and in the North American and Caribbean colonies, continued to suffer from poorly kept postal roads (made worse during inclement weather), exorbitant postage rates (and successive stamp tax increases in Britain), and a chronically underfunded system.¹⁷

Reformers attempted to expand the communication infrastructure within England and lowland Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Officials in London invested in improving and adding roads as provincial towns and cities grew both in size and importance. The process, though, was far from even. For instance, Glaswegians relied almost entirely on nearby Edinburgh for their news, despite their city’s increasing commercial importance to the empire.¹⁸ Scotland’s capital city profited from a three-day-a-week postal service with London, and the nearby port town of Leith connected Scotland with the latest news from continental Europe. After 1749, a daily postal service connected Edinburgh newspaper printers to Glasgow, but it was not until 1788 that Glaswegians enjoyed a direct postal route to London.¹⁹ The city’s...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. A Body Politic
• 2. Liberty Triumphant
• 3. In Search of Common Happiness
• 4. King-Killing Republicans
• 5. The Madness of these Deluded People
• 6. The British Lion Is Rouzed
• 7. In Defence of the Protestant Religion
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index