British Visions of America, 1775-1820
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British Visions of America, 1775-1820

Republican Realities

Emma Macleod

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eBook - ePub

British Visions of America, 1775-1820

Republican Realities

Emma Macleod

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Macleod examines changing British conceptions of America across the political spectrum during a period of political, cultural and intellectual upheaval. Macleod incorporates British writers of conservative, liberal and radical views.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317315841
Topic
History
Edition
1
1 RADICAL ANTICIPATION, c. 1775–1791: THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM
Utopia. 2. A place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions. (Oxford English Dictionary)
It is not intended that this chapter should discuss British radical responses to the policy of the British government in its American colonies, nor to the War of Independence fought by those colonies (1775–83). These important subjects have been well examined by the fine scholarship of historians such as Colin Bonwick, James Bradley and others.1 Rather, this chapter moves on to examine British reformers’ early hopes and desires for the political characteristics of an independent America, as they expressed these during the years immediately after the Declaration of Independence, on the basis that they thought that the colonists’ resistance to Britain was justified. What did they think the American republic would look like? What assets and disadvantages did they think the citizens of America began with in building their republic? What particular principles and mechanisms did they wish to see enshrined in the new constitution – and which did they hope would be avoided? How did they envisage the place of independent America in the world? The Revolution in America was instrumental in the development of the radical movement and its political ideology in Britain. Carla Hay, however, has rightly noted that historians are often so impressed by the influence of the American model on the thinking of British radicals that we pay too little attention to the advice offered by the British reformers to the Americans.2
The reforming politicians whose views are considered in this chapter did not hold identical positions on the American crisis. The radical political reform movement in Britain was at an early stage during these years, and individual members of it arrived at their libertarian ideas by different routes and at different times. There was no uniform philosophy on British politics among them, far less a uniform platform on American affairs. The principal anomaly here is the inclusion of Thomas Paine (1737–1809). He did not write about the American Revolution as an Englishman, but as an American, and so his writing is intrinsically different to that of other British sympathizers with the colonists. The identification of him with the reform movement in Britain is also complicated. Yet Paine had been born and bred an Englishman – in fact, he only arrived in America at the end of November 1774, at the age of thirty-seven – and his writing on America became well known in reforming circles in Britain, and notorious among British observers loyal to the government cause. Both Parts of his Rights of Man were written for a British audience and arguably were influenced by the progress of the reform movement in Britain.3 To leave his views out of a discussion of British images of America in the early years of the republic would be to exclude the vision to which other radicals, as well as conservatives and liberals, were responding, whether deliberately or not.
The other radical writers whose views on the formation of the American republic are examined in this chapter are Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and John Cartwright, together with some reference to the writings of Catherine Macaulay and Granville Sharp. Alongside his writing on science, education and religious liberty, Priestley (1733–1804) began to publish his criticisms of government policy on the American colonies from 1769. He wrote his Address to Protestant Dissenters on the Approaching Election (1774) at the behest of Benjamin Franklin.4 Later, after his support for the Revolution in France had caused sufficient public opposition to make his life in Britain unpleasant, he emigrated to spend the last ten years of his life in the United States. Price (1723–91), unlike Paine and Priestley, never travelled to America, though he was offered American citizenship and invited to move there with his family by Congress in 1778. He also counted Franklin as a friend, and he corresponded with several other leading American politicians, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Rush, Charles Chauncey, Henry Laurens, Joseph Willard and Jonathan Trumbull.5 Major John Cartwright (1740–1824) served as a naval lieutenant during and after the Seven Years War, but he ended his naval career when he refused to serve during the War of Independence because of his opposition to government policy in the colonies.6
The historian and political writer, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), was a member of Wilkite radical and dissenting circles in London. Her pamphlets on British politics were influential in America, alerting some leading patriots to the flaws in the British constitution, and she was explicit in her support for their grievances against the British government. She corresponded with prominent American patriots such as Benjamin Franklin, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Rush, Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, Ezra Styles, Jonathan Mayhew and Mercy Otis Warren. She visited the United States in 1784–5. Granville Sharp (1735–1813), a prominent abolitionist and parliamentary reformer, sympathized with the libertarian ideas promoted by American patriots. He took leave of absence from his post as a clerk in the Ordnance Department in 1776, and eventually resigned it, to avoid being involved in shipping supplies to the British troops in America.
These writers were influenced by the Enlightenment conviction of human progress, and by the notion that England’s American colonies had been founded in the seventeenth century with utopian idealism. They came to believe that the Revolution in America offered the opportunity, as Paine put it in 1776,
to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.7
Learning to Imagine Utopia
British sympathizers with the American colonists were, nevertheless, slow to come to terms with American independence. This is not surprising when, first, it is remembered how long it took before a radical reformist opposition to government policy in America emerged in the pre-war decade. Indeed, it was really only with the appearance of the Wilkite movement that a coherent analysis of British politics seeking substantial reform of parliamentary representation materialized for the first time since the previous century.8 There were only a few pamphlets published on American affairs in the decade up to 1774 whose views might be described as similarly critical of the role of Parliament in the Anglo-American relationship, of which the scientist and Unitarian leader Joseph Priestley’s Address to Protestant Dissenters (1774) was the most developed in terms of its radical analysis, and it was not until 1775 that they began to appear in any substantial numbers.9 Until 1774, moreover, the arguments on America focused more on criticizing individual taxes than on demanding greater representation. The general election of autumn 1774, however, was in some measure an expression of opinion on the Coercive Acts which the North government had passed in the summer in response to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773.10 Campaigners such as Cartwright, Sharp, Theophilus Lindsey, John Jebb, Josiah Wedgwood and Samuel Kenrick, who had previously been preoccupied with other issues (theological or abolitionist campaigning, or their business or professional interests) now began to speak out on American issues. As the crisis deepened and war loomed, more radical strains of criticism of government policy in America emerged, sympathizing more fully with American Patriot arguments and applying them to the British political situation. From the pamphlets published by Cartwright, Sharp, Priestley and Burgh before the election in 1774, a truly radical perspective began to develop in the pamphlets on America.11
It is therefore hardly extraordinary that it took reformers in Britain some time to recognize the likelihood, let alone the desirability, of American independence, even after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord.12 It is also true that the inhabitants of the American colonies, although three thousand miles distant from Britain, were regarded as fellow Britons by the radicals, as by the wider British public.13 Most British radicals had no wish to see the colonies becoming independent as an end in itself, but they came to accept the need for the break with America because of their abhorrence of the trajectory of government policies in America.14 John Faulkner has argued that Price described the colonists collectively as ‘Americans’ well before they did so themselves.15 Indeed, independence was hardly predicted by many in America, far less in Britain, before 1775, and a union of the new states was also not obvious until at least 1776. Many leading British radicals, however, did not begin to contemplate full separation from America until about 1778 (after the news of Saratoga) and, in some cases, as late as 1782 – in other words, no earlier than moderate opposition politicians such as Edmund Burke.16
The historian Catharine Macaulay was unusually early in grasping the imminence of American independence, predicting it to the American clergyman (later president of Yale) Ezra Stiles as early as June 1773.17 Thomas Paine, meanwhile, began to write his pamphlet arguing for American independence, Common Sense, in autumn 1775, less than a year after he had arrived in America. Most British radicals, without the benefit of residence in America, took rather longer to accept the prospect of full independence. John Cartwright later proudly stated that, ‘Before America claimed her independence, I asserted her title to it’,18 and certainly his pamphlet, American Independence: The Interest and Glory of Great Britain, had appeared in the form of newspaper articles as early as spring 1774.19 In it, he had advised Britain to concede to the American colonies ‘a declared and guaranteed independence’, and he had warned that, if Britain did not handle the separation of the American colonies well, America would turn out to be a dangerous enemy to Britain. At this point, however, and even as late as 1778, Cartwright was arguing not for full separation but for legislative devolution, with the king continuing to act as head of the American states (or, in fact, what he called ‘the United Colonies of America’). He did not at this stage envisage the colonies uniting into one polity, and therefore he foresaw a situation in which Britain’s relationship with each independent state would be one of clear superiority.20
Joseph Priestley wrote The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies in 1769, which, among other things criticized the British government for taxing its American subjects without granting them parliamentary representation.21 It was not until 1774, however, that he criticized government by monarchy (even as part of a mixed government) and anticipated physical conflict with the colonists, in his Address to Protestant Dissenters.22 Under pressure from his employer, the Earl of Shelburne, he did not write publicly on America again until the end of the war, but he later claimed that ‘from the commencement of the American war I wished for the independence of this country [America]’, and this assertion is borne out by his correspondence with Franklin.23 Richard Price’s important and influential pamphlet, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), written in defence of the American colonists, did not demand independence, but rather it promoted reconciliation within the British Empire and suggested a federal structure like that proposed by Cartwright, and also by John Jebb and Capel Lofft. Price does not seem to have abandoned hope of reconciliation until mid-1779, though he recognized that independence was all but inevitable by early in 1778.24 Michael Durey points out that other radicals, such as Benjamin Vaughan, still hoped for reconciliation between Britain and America as late as 1778.25 Granville Sharp argued strenuously in favour of the American colonists’ position in 1774, but just as vigorously against their independence, until early 1778. He took explicit issue with the conservative Josiah Tucker’s early argument in favour of conceding independence to the colonists in 1774, on the grounds that it would benefit neither party. Even in 1777 he believed that parliamentary reform in Britain would persuade the American patriots to be reunited with Britain.26
Moreover, the fact was that Britain was the primary problem and focus for British radicals other than Paine. Except during the early years of the French Revolution, Paine was sufficiently excited by developments in America and sufficiently disillusioned by the Old World to believe that European glory and potential lay in the past.27 While they were disgusted by their government’s treatment of America and by the war, this outrage caused most other British radicals to be engrossed with hopes and plans for British reform rather than by aspirations for a future American republic.28 The war chiefly preoccupied them with its impact on Britain, rather than with its effects on America. In Take Your Choice! (1776), John Cartwright argued that the loss of the American colonies would be less terrible than the loss of liberty at home resulting from the government’s continued refusal to grant parliamentary reform.29 Earlier writings on government did not necessarily direct their advice they towards policy-makers in America, even if they were eventually persuasive in the colonies, such as Macaulay’s eight volume Whig ...

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