A Short History of the American Revolutionary War

Stephen Conway

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733542
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia americana temprana

The American war against British imperial rule (1775-1783) was the world's first great popular revolution. Ideologically defined by the colonists' formal Declaration of Independence in 1776, the struggle has taken on something of a mythic character. From the Boston Tea Party to Paul Revere's ride to raise the countryside of New England against the march of the Redcoats; and from the American travails of Bunker Hill (1775) to the final humiliation of the British at Yorktown (1781), the entire contest is now emblematic of American national identity. Stephen Conway shows that, beyond mythology, this was more than just a local conflict: rather a titanic struggle between France and Britain. The Thirteen Colonies were merely one frontline of an extended theatre of operations, with each superpower aiming to deliver the knockout blow. This bold new history recognizes the war as the Revolution but situates it on the wider, global canvas of European warfare.

1

THE LONG ROAD TO LEXINGTON

How far back do we need to go to explain why Massachusetts militiamen and British soldiers exchanged shots at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775? Most accounts of the coming of the Revolutionary War rightly focus on the years immediately preceding the outbreak of fighting. The destruction at Boston in December 1773 of a large cargo of tea subject to a tax levied by the British Parliament led to a fierce parliamentary reaction, the most important part of which was the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774. By altering the colony’s charter to reduce popular involvement, the Act was the trigger for revolt. These events are usually linked to the first attempts by Parliament to tax the colonies in the 1760s, which are commonly seen as the start of a constitutional crisis that was to eventuate in war and American independence.¹ However, our understanding of the Revolution is enhanced if we are willing to look earlier still.

Many historians point to long-term developments dating from the first decades of the eighteenth century. Some emphasize how the social fluidity and opportunity of the early years of settlement gave way to a more rigid and hierarchical order as the best land was occupied and the economy became more commercialized. They also point to the tensions in the urban centres – especially the northern ports of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Mounting class discontent, according to this interpretation, led Americans to react against both social and political hierarchies, overthrowing British rule in the process.² Others focus on the arrival of large numbers of non-English settlers in the eighteenth century, principally Irish Protestants and Scottish Highlanders, but also many Germans. By the eve of the Revolution, about one tenth of the white colonial population was of German origin; in Pennsylvania, one third. These new migrants – Irish, Scots and German – brought greater religious diversity to the colonies and, in the view of some historians, began to create a distinctly American people likely to be resistant to attempts to impose external authority.³ Still other historians see a link between the evangelical fervour that intermittently gripped the colonies from the 1720s and the challenges to the established order and the popular political participation that were features of the revolutionary era.⁴

Changes in colonial society no doubt played a part in causing the Revolution, and certainly help to account for why it developed in the way that it did. However, the underlying reason for the colonies’ rejection of British authority was not their changing nature but their clinging to old ways, particularly their continuing adherence to seventeenth-century English political culture. In the eighteenth century the people of the colonies, reflecting the political orthodoxy of the time of their founding, associated Englishness with largely self-governing communities. They happily acknowledged their allegiance to the Crown – ‘our common head and father’, as the Massachusetts assembly described George III in 1768 – even as they tried to emasculate the governors it appointed.⁵ They never accepted that the Westminster Parliament had the right to pass laws that bound them. For practical purposes, the colonies acquiesced in some parliamentary legislation, so long as they regarded it as mutually beneficial. Nevertheless, despite their occasional tactical flattery of Parliament, they would not recognize its sovereign authority. A crisis would, of course, have been avoided if Parliament had not tried to impose its will and, in particular, had not tried to levy taxes in America, but the colonies’ static conception of their autonomy was repeatedly challenged by the desire of dynamic metropolitan authorities for more central control. After the Seven Years War (1756–63), new imperial imperatives meant that British attempts to interfere increased markedly and created a crisis in the relationship between colonies and mother country. In a very real sense, the American Revolution was – or, at least, started as – a conservative defence of the status quo against British innovation.⁶ To understand this, we need to go back to the early years of English settlement.

American commitment to self-government rested on the early experience of colonization. English common law was introduced with the first settlers, and each new colony soon had an elected assembly designed to represent and protect the interests of the settler population, acting much like a local equivalent of the Westminster House of Commons. In theory, popular participation in government was balanced by a strong executive, in the person of the governor, supported by an advisory council. But in the first years of settlement, when colonies were sponsored by private companies rather than the Crown, governors and councils were often themselves elected, reinforcing the tendency towards local control. The institutional framework for local self-government was therefore in place from the very beginnings of English America. Furthermore, initially the colonies functioned with very little interference from London. The Crown, apart from issuing the charters that gave the colonies a legal basis, left the work of early settlement to groups of private investors.

Only once the colonies had established themselves, and started to become profitable, did the Crown show an interest. In 1621, James I required Virginia tobacco exports to be sent to England to boost his customs revenues. Three years later he made Virginia a royal colony, with a royally appointed governor, answerable to the king and his ministers in England. James’s son Charles I hoped to see ‘one uniforme course of Government’ across all his dominions,⁷ and he wanted to curb the autonomy of the Puritan New England colonies in the 1630s. To limit the expansion of Massachusetts, Charles established a new royal colony of Maine, and appointed as its first governor Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a staunch Episcopalian opponent of the Puritans. Charles even planned to place the whole of New England under Gorges’ charge, only for political and military crisis at home – the coming of the English Civil War – to prevent his putting these wishes into practice.⁸

The civil war in England, and the short-lived republic established after the execution of Charles I, reduced London’s interference in colonial affairs. Unsurprisingly, domestic events preoccupied English ministers. However, the desire to control the colonies across the Atlantic did not disappear. In 1651, the Westminster Parliament passed a Navigation Ordnance, designed to exclude the Dutch from trade with English America. With the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, centralizing impulses increased markedly. Charles II and his brother and successor James II launched the most concerted seventeenth-century assault on colonial self-government. More new provinces were established as royal colonies, or as proprietary possessions of the king’s relatives and courtiers, with appointed governors answerable to the king and his minsters in England. Local resistance to the Westminster Parliament’s regulation of colonial trade through the Navigation Acts of 1660, 1663 and 1673 led to the revocation of the original Massachusetts charter in 1684, and the beginning of a process of remodelling colonial government. From 1685, James II incorporated all of the New England colonies – and eventually New York and New Jersey – in one great Dominion of New England, ruled by a royally appointed Governor General, Sir Edmund Andros, without elected assemblies.⁹ The Dominion soon collapsed, but only after James II had himself been effectively deposed in England during the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. With the fall of the Stuarts, the new regime in London restored the colonial assemblies but, at the same time, continued its efforts to assert greater central control. The Board of Trade was established in 1696 to gather information on the colonies, oversee their development and make policy recommendations to ministers. Another Navigation Act in the same year enhanced metropolitan supervision of colonial overseas trade.

In the first half of the eighteenth century such interventions were rarer. It was true that the wars of 1702–13 and 1739–48 encouraged government in London to value the colonies and their trade, and therefore to make fresh efforts to exert greater control. However, during the long period of peace while Sir Robert Walpole dominated British politics in the 1720s and 1730s, the colonies experienced very little interference. Rather than being the product of neglect and indifference, limited intervention seems to have reflected a deliberate policy. Walpole recognized that the colonies were contributing to national prosperity and so was keen to avoid any disputes that might disrupt a beneficial relationship. When colonial governors found themselves locked in conflict with their local assemblies, Walpole and his secretary of state, the Duke of Newcastle, encouraged accommodation rather than confrontation, even if that meant giving way to the assemblies’ demands.¹⁰ Walpole’s era saw some legislative interventions, especially to protect British economic interests, but rarely did he seek to enforce restrictive regulations, and during his period of office the colonies enjoyed considerable autonomy. The Earl of Halifax, an active and determined President of the Board of Trade, tried in the late 1740s and early 1750s to claw back the ground lost to the colonial assemblies under Walpole. However, his tangible achievements were few; perhaps his most important innovation was the introduction of a regular packet boat service between Britain and the colonies, which enabled American governors to communicate more easily with ministers in London.¹¹

A new conflict with France that began in the mid-1750s brought Britain and the colonies closer than they had ever been before, yet ultimately helped to drive them apart. At first, the British government sought to repel French incursions in the Ohio Valley by a traditional appeal to the various colonies to provide locally raised soldiers, but the response was disappointing. In 1754, an attempt to coordinate colonial military efforts at the Albany Congress produced agreement, only for the different colonial assemblies to reject what they saw as an attempt to usurp their functions.¹² The failure of the Albany plan, the poor performance of colonial military forces in the first clashes in the Ohio Valley and the reluctance of some of the colonial assemblies to respond to the Crown’s requests that they vote money to raise regiments of provincial soldiers encouraged the British government to send its own troops across the Atlantic. At first these troops fared no better than the colonists, but the ministerial response to initial setbacks was to pour more and more resources into North America with the intention of removing, once and for all, the French threat from Canada. Never before had so many Americans come into contact with British soldiers.

Historians who claim that the experience of the Seven Years War was a vital part of the background to the Revolution tend to emphasize American resentments at the behaviour of the British regulars.¹³ The letters and diaries of locally raised provincial soldiers suggest a cultural gulf between the two armed forces, with Americans viewing the redcoats as haughty and authoritarian and ignorant of the more contractual basis of military service in the colonies.¹⁴ Yet American discomfort was largely confined to the first, distinctly unsuccessful, phase of the war to the end of 1757, and from the beginning of 1758 Americans had good reason to be more positive about the experience of the conflict. In part this was attributable to the recall of Lord Loudoun, the commander-in-chief of the British army whose abrasive criticisms of the colonists caused considerable upset. More important were the other concessions offered by William Pitt, the British Secretary of State responsible for running the war. He boosted provincial officers’ status by no longer requiring them to take orders from the lowliest British ensign or lieutenant, and he gave the assemblies a substantial parliamentary subsidy to help cover the costs of paying for a more extensive mobilization of American manpower.¹⁵

Colonial enthusiasm for Pitt’s new settlement was quickly apparent – the various assemblies between them pledged to put 23,000 provincial soldiers in the field for the 1758 campaign.¹⁶ As large numbers of colonial troops joined equally large numbers of British regulars, the French position became increasingly parlous. That year, British and American colonial forces suffered a reverse at Fort Carillon, where the Marquis de Montcalm, the French commander, mounted a skillful defence. However Louisbourg on Cape Breton and Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario were captured, exposing the French Canadian heartland to attack from east and west. Quebec in the St Lawrence Valley followed in 1759, and Montreal, the capital of New France, in 1760. American discontents in the first phase of the war were now replaced by the warm glow of success. When the war in North America drew to a close, the colonists appeared far from alienated by the experience of fighting alongside British soldiers. On the contrary, they celebrated their Britishness with great enthusiasm; the assemblymen of Massachusetts proclaiming that it was ‘our highest Honour to be ranked amongst the foremost of his Majesty’s loyal American Subjects’ and ‘exult[ing] in the Blessings of being freeborn Subjects of Great-Britain, the leading and most Respectable power in the whole World’.¹⁷

If we are to establish that the experience of the Seven Years War played a part in the coming of the Revolution, we have to look beyond American resentments. More important, perhaps, was the impact on New Englanders of the anti-Catholic rhetoric used to encourage their recruitment. In a sense, not much encouragement was required. The region’s distinctive environmental conditions – poor soils and a short growing season – produced low crop yields and an agricultural sector that was always struggling to produce saleable surpluses; this lack of profitability, combined with large families and many young men with few prospects of inheriting property, meant that a plentiful supply of potential soldiers was available.¹⁸ But in order to inspire them to volunteer for the provincial service, and build community support for their efforts, clergymen and political leaders portrayed the war against the French in Canada as a new crusade against ‘popery’, a term that referred to more than Catholicism in its religious sense, and encompassed arbitrary and top-down government in all its forms. New Englanders who had their historical animus to popery intensified in the war were likely to be particularly sensitive to anything that seemed redolent of French-style authoritarianism in the years that followed. They seem to have convinced themselves that parliamentary taxes were a sign that the British government had itself embraced popery.¹⁹

However, the British response to the experience of the Seven Years War was at least as important as the reactions of the Americans. Colonial resentments in the first stage of the war were understandable; British officers did indeed look with disdain on the contribution of the provincial forces. They continued to do so after 1758 – their contempt was perhaps better disguised in the second phase of the war than in the first, but it was still regularly expressed in letters home and private diaries. The slowness of the Americans to take to the field was a frequent complaint.²⁰ Worse still, the failure in the first years of the war of the traditional requisition system (whereby the Crown requested each colony to raise a quota of soldiers, the governor conveyed this request to his assembly and the assembly decided whether to agree), left a lasting legacy of doubt in British minds about the suitability of the system as a means of organizing imperial defence. Politicians at Westminster were to refer specifically to the uneven response of the colonies to royal requisitions in postwar debates about America – even the New York assembly acknowledged that the system had not worked equitably.²¹ Another feature of the war, known to ministers in London during its course but revealed to the wider British public only when it was safely won, was extensive American trading with the enemy. The impression conveyed in the British press was that the colonists, far from working in productive partnership with the British army, had enabled New France to hold out for longer than it should have done.²² With very few exceptions, British commentators saw the war as a British triumph, secured in spite of the Americans, not due to their help. Britons’ sense that the colonists owed them a debt of gratitude was to be very influential in postwar debates about what to do with a greatly enlarged British Empire.

Even so, the outcome of the conflict, rather than any damage done to Anglo–American relations during its course, is the principal reason for seeing the Seven Years War as an important part of the explanation for the coming of the Revolution. The British government’s decision to keep Canada may well have been a mistake; in retrospect, we can see that it probably lessened American dependency on Britain by removing a common enemy on the colonies’ doorstep.²³ But a more important ingredient of future tensions was perhaps the expansion of the British Empire in general. Its size and nature had dramatically changed. In 1750 the North Ameri...