1775 (10 page)

Despite its prickly and Puritan image, the Massachusetts of mid-1774 enjoyed new stature and sympathy as the victim of Britain’s harsh retaliation for the tea being thrown into Boston Harbor. The king and Parliament had badly miscalculated, not realizing that the tea shipments were unpopular almost everywhere. Pennsylvania governor John Penn reported back that “the general Temper of the People, as well here, as in other Parts of America, is very warm. They look upon the Chastisement of Boston to be purposely vigorous, and held up by way of intimidation to all America; and in short that Boston is Suffering in the Common Cause.”
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Although Massachusetts had always been preeminent in New England, its delegates came to the First Congress on their best behavior to uphold their refurbished credibility. Samuel Adams got off to a shrewd and ecumenical start by suggesting that Philadelphia Anglican rector Jacob Duche give the opening invocation, which Duche did, to wide approval.
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The Adams
cousins were gladdened—possibly even surprised—when the Congress voted a ringing endorsement of Massachusetts’s own Suffolk Resolves. Few would have imagined that a month earlier. Part of what sustained the Bay Colony’s momentum, as we will see, was rare political talent: two Machiavellis (Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren), a legal scholar (John Adams), and a Winged Mercury (Paul Revere).

That these were the two most important provinces in 1774–1775 is clear. The caveat is that trite telling has brought about oversimplified explanations and unjustifiable omissions. Several other colonies played more forward roles than chroniclers typically note. And even for Virginia and Massachusetts, greater emphasis must go to how vital activity and confrontation reached back through 1775 into the tense and electric months of 1774.

Identifying the 1774–1775 Vanguard

To explain the whys and wherefores of why four colonies were in the vanguard, the most instructive approach is to explain why the other nine were not. The yardsticks are uncomplicated. Most of the thirteen were simply too small, too new, or lacking in some essential pre-Revolutionary mindset, thereby underscoring the four preeminent roles.

Setting aside the early-twenty-first-century attributes and relative importance of the thirteen is essential. What counts is what they were like long ago—their political and cultural quirks and personalities—in the crucible of 1774–1775.

Pennsylvania was fast-growing and prosperous. Three decades of heavy emigration from Europe had made it the second most populous province, displacing Massachusetts. It had the biggest city (burgeoning Philadelphia), the colonies’ most central location, and the largest population of several swing ethnic and religious groups: Scotch-Irish, Germans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. If this religious diversity reflected the province’s tolerance, it also generated many divisions, which were not conducive to bold politics. Philadelphia was also British North America’s center of relative sophistication in matters philosophical, cultural, and scientific.

Also, having been established by royal grant only in 1683, Pennsylvania lagged the independent thinking of the colonies a generation or two older. A further reluctance mirrored the colony’s heritage of pacifist-minded Quakerism. On top of which, local politics during the 1760s were kept parochial by fierce infighting over whether to continue proprietary government
under the Penn family or become a royal colony. These distractions squelched, rather than encouraged, the larger debate developing in New England, Virginia, and South Carolina.

Pennsylvania would ultimately wield a different weight. For all that the colony had to be coaxed, even shoved, by pro-independence schemers, its late commitment made a powerful wave. Still, we do best to examine Pennsylvania as a key laggard, not vanguard. The heated debates of 1774–1775 involved ink, rhetoric, huge crowds, and printing presses—and the presence of two successive Continental Congresses—but never British bayonets or naval broadsides from the 44-gun frigates probing the Delaware River. London, too, recognized Pennsylvania’s indecision.

New York, another fast-growing province, included the colonies’ second-largest city, which doubled as British North America’s foremost imperial center. Population statistics of that era have major gaps, but as of 1770, the future twentieth-century “Empire State” ranked only fourth, fifth, or sixth (in a three-way demographic horse race with North Carolina and Connecticut). Politically, New York was atypical and cosmopolitan, its Assembly dominated by landed gentry. Several manors doubled as political units. Despite its seventeenth-century Dutch colonial antecedents—a heritage that complicated local Patriot insistence on the “rights of Englishmen”—by the 1770s, most observers ranked the colony first in both loyal sentiment and pride in its British connection. Distrust of next-door New England was rife, just as it had been under Dutch government. “Between New England and the Middle States,” later argued historian Henry Adams, “was a gap like that between Scotland and England.”
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If Massachusetts was rebellious, pre-Revolutionary New York struck many outsiders as indecisive and London clinging. Four counties in the lower section of the province—New York, Richmond, Queens, and Westchester—had an Anglican church establishment, the only such in the northern colonies, making it a center of what critics called ecclesiastical imperialism. New York was also the hub of Britain’s North American military administration; and as a royal colony, “New York had little to buffer it from the demands of English politicians who viewed North American affairs primarily as an opportunity to strengthen their influence at home…by securing as many provincial appointments (such as governor, attorney general, provincial secretary or naval officer) as they possibly could.”
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The General Committee of South Carolina commiserated by letter to New York Patriots that “we are not ignorant of that crowd of placemen, of contractors,
of officers, and needy dependents upon the Crown, who are constantly employed to frustrate your measures.”
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To one regional historian, “more than Pennsylvania, New York displayed noticeable streaks of Anglophilia.”
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To another, “The social customs of prominent New Yorkers were slavishly copied from London models. New York not only had replicas of the most prominent London entertainment halls but even named its resorts Vauxhall and Ranelagh.”
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In 1775, the best residential districts along Broad Street and from Bowling Green along Broadway to the western end of Wall Street were said to follow “the latest London architectural fashions.”
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Not a few New Yorkers saw their future on an imperial horizon. Merchants and lawyers looked ahead 50 or 100 years and imagined their city and Philadelphia becoming new hubs of empire, when the center of gravity of English-speaking people moved from the British Isles to North America. No such advancement could be expected by Yankee New England, with its disdain for mother-country corruption, or by the slave-owning southern plantation colonies.

New York, in consequence, was where British strategists aimed to split the not-quite-united colonies. For one thing, the Crown had earlier favored New York’s claim to present-day Vermont over New Hampshire’s, a boon to New York land investors. In the spring of 1775, Parliament omitted New York from that year’s second Restraining Act barring colonial trade with Britain and the West Indies. Alexander Hamilton, then still a college student, had a different concern—that if New York continued to be irresolute with a Loyalist bias, New Englanders might invade and end its autonomy in order to deny the British.
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In and around New York City, many elements conspicuous on the Patriot side were groups that conservatives and moderates viewed skeptically: artisans, mechanics, Liberty Boys, seamen, and Anglican-baiting Presbyterians. Not surprisingly, stolid Dutch farmers across the river in Brooklyn were heavily Loyalist. By mid-1775, Loyalist strength meant that Patriots could not rely on militias in lower New York counties like Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester. During those months, Congress had to ask Connecticut and to a lesser extent New Jersey for soldiers to keep order in New York or suppress Tories. In turn, having Connecticut troops in Manhattan only made ambivalent Yorkers more nervous. Right through July 1776, New York was the last colony to support independence. Its profile could be sketched in one word:
reluctance.

So much for the large swing provinces. In 1775, neither was able to marshal a political consensus, let alone emerge as a driving force. Not a few of New York’s prominent Patriot leaders and delegates to Congress—several Livingstons, Philip Schuyler, and James Duane—were moderate conservatives who did not want a vanguard role. A zealot like Isaac Sears wound up moving to Connecticut.

Other colonies could not be pacesetters or influence wielders for want of size or weight. Among the four least populous—New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Georgia—several had strong rebel biases. None, however, bred political leaders of national stature. New Hampshire and Rhode Island, besides being small, lay in the regional shadow of Massachusetts. Tiny Delaware, despite gaining its own Assembly in 1701, was still a three-county appendage of Pennsylvania. Georgia, established in 1733, often depended on South Carolina, its strong-minded neighbor. Georgia’s royal governor, Sir James Wright, half joked that his colony would have kept out of the Revolution if only the Savannah River, the boundary with South Carolina, had not been so narrow.
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Not that being a nursery of great issues or major national leaders was a blessing. Had Delaware, for example, been a political pivot, its large ratio of vocal Loyalists might have forced a military solution. That was never necessary. And New Hampshire, for its part, was the one state the British Army ignored between 1775 and 1783.

North Carolina, bold enough in 1775, fell short of being a major force. Despite its population trebling in the quarter century before the Revolution, the colony had begun its existence in the 1720s as a minor periphery of the greater “Carolina” headquartered in Charleston. Much poorer than rice-plantation-rich South Carolina, the northern offshoot was also a study in confused identity—its northeast (the Albemarle) grew around an early population spillover from adjacent Virginia, while its southeast (Cape Fear) was settled in the 1720s from next-door South Carolina. Prior to its huge influx, the new province had little political coherence or weight. As of 1775, many of the new settlers in North Carolina’s central or Piedmont region had poured in from Pennsylvania and Virginia looking for cheap land and better opportunity. But this was more destabilizing than unifying. Unfocused latter-day population growth produced nothing like the 170-year history and self-confidence of Virginia or the 150-year Puritan battle-consciousness that inspired Massachusetts.

Elsewhere, two midsize colonies, Maryland and New Jersey, while not
leaders, were weightier than the minor quartet. But neither had a location or history that lent itself to pre-Revolutionary leadership. Maryland stood out as the only colony among the thirteen launched under a Catholic proprietor, the English Lord Baltimore, in 1634. The proprietorship of the Calvert family (no longer Catholic) still prevailed in 1774, and as in Pennsylvania, that issue confused and parochialized local politics. Maryland’s leading Revolutionary statesman was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a French-educated Catholic member of the Continental Congress. His best-known service came in early 1776 as part of a congressional mission to Catholic Quebec. By 1775, Maryland was largely Protestant, but several older Chesapeake counties—St. Mary’s, Calvert, and parts of Anne Arundel and Prince Georges—retained a locally important Catholic gentry.

In agricultural terms, much of southern Maryland was tobacco country, but its leaf production was well below Virginia’s. Northern Maryland’s principal crop was wheat, as in next-door Pennsylvania. Indeed, the booming port of Baltimore principally served a wheat-growing Pennsylvania hinterland, and Baltimore’s Patriot faction had ties to Philadelphia radicals. As we have seen, in 1775 the Continental Congress put Maryland in a military district with the middle colonies—the “bread colonies”—and so will this chapter. Maryland talked tough on preparedness and gunpowder procurement but was cautious with respect to independence. John Adams commented “that this is so eccentric a colony—sometimes so hot, sometimes so cold; now so high, then so low—that I know not what to say about it or to expect from it.”
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New Jersey represented another awkward piece in the colonial jigsaw puzzle. As of 1702, it combined the two “Jerseys” that had begun separately—West Jersey, the southern half abutting Philadelphia, and East Jersey, the northern section across the Hudson from New York. But their cultural dissimilarity lingered. West Jersey bore a substantial Pennsylvania and Quaker imprint, while East Jersey had a mixed New England, Scottish, New York Dutch, and German population. No nursery of potential national leadership existed. In 1774, New Jersey’s royal governor illustrated the province’s lack of cohesion by citing how the capital still alternated between Perth Amboy in former East Jersey and Burlington in old West Jersey.
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Between 1776 and 1778, New Jersey became just what many New Jerseyans had feared—a venue of battles, from Fort Lee on the Hudson to Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth. This, too, had inhibited New Jersey forwardness. The colony’s best-known political activists—its first governor,
William Livingston, from the New York family, and John Witherspoon, member of the Continental Congress and later president of Princeton University—came to New Jersey with ideas shaped elsewhere. Witherspoon, for example, came to the colonies from the covenanting southwest of Scotland in 1768 at age 45, already Presbyterian, already evangelical, already radical.

These capsules underscore a basic reality: most colonies were followers, not leaders. The process of elimination, by cataloguing smallness, lack of influence, or a dearth of local identity, leaves us with the other two vanguard colonies. South Carolina, chartered in 1667, was only midsize once shorn of North Carolina and Georgia, but it was aggressive, vocal, and wealthy. Connecticut, first chartered in 1635, also aggressive, was until 1770 the fourth most populous province. At this point, we can put population nuances aside. Size certainly counted, but history, achievement, and pride seem to have been the distinguishing characteristics.