Anglo-American Attitudes

From Revolution to Partnership

Fred M. Leventhal, Roland Quinault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351958363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Anglo-American Attitudes is a pioneering study of Anglo-American connections in their widest sense. Previous studies of Anglo-American relations have focused narrowly on official government-to-government contacts rather than on other kinds of less formal links. This book redresses that imbalance by examining not only diplomatic relations, but also a wide variety of social, economic, intellectual and cultural connections. It is also the first study which examines Anglo-American relations over not just the few decades of the 'special relationship', but over the whole period since the American Revolution. The book opens up many new themes and perspectives which illuminate the evolution of bilateral relations, mutual perceptions and the comparative development of both nations. Anglo-American Attitudes will be invaluable not only for students of British and American history, but also for anyone who wants to understand the complex nature of an association which has played a key role in the evolution of the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Case for Coercing America before the Revolution

P. J. Marshall

In an essay first published over 20 years ago, Jack P. Greene posed some characteristically acute ‘questions resolved and unresolved’ about Britain’s role in the coming of the Revolution. Why, he asked, did Britain launch restrictive policies directed at the colonies, why did successive governments persist in such policies, and why could the dominant strands in British opinion find no way to escape from an ultimate descent into violence, war and defeat?¹ These questions were, of course, old ones when Greene asked them and historians have continued to address them since then. The evolution of British policy and parliamentary responses to the revolutionary crisis have, for instance, been authoritatively elucidated in P. D. G. Thomas’s trilogy.² Yet H. T. Dickinson, editor of a valuable collection of essays published in 1998, points out that, ‘the motives and deeper justifications for the imperial policies that were pursued by successive British governments’ have still not been explored to anything like the same depth as has been achieved in the vast corpus of writing on the American side of the Revolution.³ His collection and the appearance of Eliga H. Gould’s The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution⁴ are evidence that exploration is continuing with vigour. This chapter is a limited foray into the still imperfectly known terrain of the preoccupations of Britain’s rulers that underlay their imperial policies.

Greene has done much to establish the time-scale for understanding the British role in the revolutionary crisis. The traditional emphasis on ‘new’ British policies following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 now looks unsatisfactory. In his essay ‘“A Posture of Hostility”: A Reconsideration of Some Aspects of the Origins of the American Revolution’, Greene assembled much evidence to show that British officials were deeply concerned about the state of the American colonies in the 1740s. ‘The whole American empire from Barbados to Nova Scotia seemed to be on the verge of disintegration.’⁵ The 1740s now seem also to have been crucial in two other aspects. In the first place, British opinion became increasingly aware of the vast potential of the North American market for the British economy and ultimately of its role in underpinning what has been called the British ‘fiscal-military state’. Second, British concern about France, its commercial and maritime power and its supposedly hostile intentions towards Britain all over the world reached new heights at the end of the 1740s. In response to what they took to be ‘le Projet de la Monarchie universale des Anglois’, based on world-wide commercial hegemony, after the peace of 1748, the French became increasingly assertive outside Europe, and especially in North America.⁶ Reports of French moves greatly alarmed British opinion. Ministers were determined that empire in America must be shored up to protect Britain’s vital interests there and to keep France at bay.

The first attempts to restore British authority in North America were devised by the Earl of Halifax under the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. What appeared to be overt French aggression and the failure of colonial self-defence from 1754 made reform a matter of urgency. Lord Loudoun, a commander-in-chief who developed strong ideas about the need to compel the colonies to act effectively under British leadership, was appointed in 1756. His relations with colonial governments were often abrasive. He was, for instance, close to taking winter quarters for his troops in Boston by force. But his military failures led to his dismissal in 1757 and to a shift under Pitt to a policy of conciliating colonial opinion. This policy included very large parliamentary reimbursements for colonial expenditure.

As is notorious, conciliation did not survive the ending of the war. A slate of measures for regulating the colonies was enacted, most of them, the Proclamation of 1763, the Molasses Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act and the Stamp Act, during the ministry of George Grenville, but some, like the decision to maintain a large British garrison in America, pre-dating him. Current assessments would suggest that what was involved was less a planned programme of reform than a catching-up with old problems, such as the due enforcement of the Navigation Acts, and a response to urgent new ones, notably to the pressure of a huge debt incurred in wartime and to the need to provide for the government and defence of new conquests.⁷ In nearly all these measures the authority of Parliament over the colonies was specifically invoked.

Over the next ten years the well-known story was to unfold of further limited measures of colonial reform, of partial retreats combined with tenacious adherence to the rights of Parliament and of the eventual attempt to coerce Massachusetts in response to what seemed to be its persistent disobedience. At that point compromise proved impossible.

On the British side there is no evidence of any systematic desire to subjugate America in these years. It is clear, however, that there was persistent anxiety on the part of certain colonial governors, Whitehall officials and politicians, such as Charles Townshend or Lord Hillsborough, who took a close interest in the colonies, about the state of British authority in America. They believed, as some of them had done since the 1740s, that the empire was not functioning effectively and that British authority was being seriously undermined. They feared a drift towards an effective separation. The scenario was rarely made explicit, but what was envisaged was not the emergence of a new independent United States, an inconceivable prospect even to nearly all Americans before the mid-1770s, but disintegration, with individual colonies becoming ungovernable and ceasing to obey the Navigation Acts, as Rhode Island and Connecticut were presumed to do already, the rise of internal disorder and outright conflict between colonies. As the North American empire fell apart, the French would pick off the colonies one by one.

It took at least until 1774 for the majority of Britain’s political leadership to be brought to accept the gloomy prognostications of the self-confessed experts. Only when opinion became convinced that the survival of empire in America was at stake was there support for the deeply unpalatable course of armed coercion, although it was hoped that a limited application of force against what was taken to be a small minority of the irredeemably refractory would be all that was needed.

British national interests of the highest importance were believed to depend on the survival of empire. There is abundant evidence that at least from the 1740s ministers were convinced of the great importance of North America to British commerce and manufacturing, and therefore of its pre-eminent role in generating the revenue and the funds available for government borrowing on which British public finance depended. To quote one striking example, Thomas Robinson, a transient and not very effective Secretary of State, wrote of the perceived French threat in 1755:

If the dispute turned upon a little more or less advantage in the trade in furs, or even upon whole regions of Deserts, France would not have pursued one fixed scheme of encroachments and usurpations for so many years … The great object is still the same. Vizt the security of his Majesty’s American dominions upon which the prosperity of these dominions so much depends. ‘Full one third of the whole export of the produce and manufactures of the country is to our Colonies and in proportion as this diminishes or increases, the Estates of Landholders, and the business of the Merchant, the Manufacturer and the artificer must diminish or increase.’

In a supplementary paper, Robinson added that it was ‘from the American colonies,’ that

the great part of the Revenues of these Kingdoms is derived; and it is from them the great part of the wealth we see, that Credit which Circulates, and those payments which are made at the Bank, and the bankers in London results; and they are so linked in with and dependent upon the American Revenues and remittances that if they are ruined and stopt, the whole system of public Credit in this country will receive a fatal Shock.⁸

The argument about Britain’s economic dependence on America could, of course, cut both ways. America could be portrayed, as it was by the Rockingham administration in 1765–66, as so valuable that concession must be preferred to any attempted coercion. For the Duke of Newcastle, who had been ‘bred up to think that the Trade of this nation is the sole Support of it’, ‘the very being of this country, as a trading nation’ depended on the repeal of the Stamp Act. The ‘obstinate headstrong’ Americans could not be taxed and the consequences of their resistance would be ‘Riots, Mobbs, and Insurrections in all the great towns in the Kingdom and Numbers of our Manufacturers turned to Starving’.⁹ Realistically, coercion of America could be seen as an invitation for France and Spain to attack, a point made as early as 1766 by General Conway, when he anticipated that ‘a French and Spanish war … connected with an American war would be the absolute ruin of this country’.¹⁰ Nevertheless for the majority in Parliament after 1774, the consequences of imperial disintegration were so dire as to outweigh almost any short-term economic price or any risk of international conflict. In the last resort, if effective control over the empire really was at stake, there could be no alternative to coercion.

The survival of empire was deemed to depend on the acceptance by the colonies of an ultimate metropolitan authority, even if in practice this would only normally be exerted over certain limited if vital areas, notably trade and defence. The degree of autonomy enjoyed by its colonial populations was matter for pride and self-congratulation for all shades of British opinion. Freedom produced commercial vitality. It was what distinguished the British empire from those of other powers. Nevertheless, Britain must retain reserve powers for emergencies that overrode all local privileges, and her right to them could not be questioned. In the 1750s reformers were concerned with reinvigorating the prerogative powers of the Crown. Anxious Americans like Franklin believed that royal instructions to governors would be given the force of l...