1775 (38 page)

If British imperialists had swollen heads in 1763, so did many Americans who knew full well which colonies were being discussed. By 1775, as we have seen, North American population gains had put the mainland thirteen ahead of Holland and Switzerland, close to Denmark and Portugal, and not too far short of Prussia, which had dropped to a population of only 4 million people following severe losses in the Seven Years War.
¹²
If French and other Continental leaders unhappy with Britain’s new supremacy commented openly on the American colonies having shifted the balance of power, their sotto voce speculation was more cynical. Would the revolt of the American colonies humble the British Lion? Was France already encouraging that dissatisfaction and incipient nationalism to become revolution?

Commerce: North Americans’ Increasing Rejection of Economic Subordination

To Louis Hacker, a progressive historian of the mid-twentieth century, “the struggle was not over high-sounding political and constitutional concepts: over the power of taxation and, on the final analysis, over natural rights: but over colonial manufacturing, wild lands and furs, sugar, wine, tea and currency, all of which meant, simply, the survival or collapse of English merchant capitalism within the imperial-colonial framework of the mercantilist system.”
¹³
No other cause or category, he contended, mattered nearly as much.

Economic determinism was then in vogue. Hacker held forth in 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had consummated the triumph of the Progressive School. However, within two or three decades, their overinsistence would be matched by an opposite excess: the thesis of Neo-Whig or Consensus historians that political ideals and constitutional concepts were all-important in explaining the Revolution, while economic causes were peripheral at best.

Almost by nature, intellectuals exaggerate the importance of ideology and doctrine. Nevertheless, the ups and downs of the different schools of American history can be important. It is a cliché that politicians talking about employment, budgets, and spending are often simply regurgitating the ideas of some dead economist. Perhaps, and politicians giving pompous speeches about the United States as the architect of global democracy may be echoing some dead Consensus historian or Fourth of July orator.

Part of what Consensus historians called constitutional debate was economic. Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Briton whose views have usually been applied to buttress a constitutional and ideological approach, in this case emphasized an economic underpinning. “The consideration of those great commercial interests [manufacturing and trade],” he argued in 1769, had become the context in which Britons debated and evaluated imperial policy. Thus, “the spirit of an extensive and intricate trading interest pervades the whole, always qualifying, and often controlling, every general idea of constitution and government.”
¹⁴
A reasonable capsule might be:
economic
motivations, c
onstitutional
rhetoric.

In 1775, then, an imperial system that was partly constitutional, partly economic, was in dispute between Britain and America. By the late
eighteenth century, the two English-speaking peoples brought increasingly different legal cultures into the courtrooms of empire, divergences to which we will turn shortly. However, the stunning growth of British manufacturing and trade during the prior quarter century had seized Britons’ imagination. Descriptions of a new “political oeconomy” were being urged on British officials and parliamentarians by a set of thinkers including Sir James Steuart, Josiah Tucker, Joseph Massie, Thomas Mortimer, and Malachy Postlethwayt. But thinking remained in flux, and mercantilist doctrine continued to guide the king and cabinet. Hints of American rejection of mercantilism, in turn, became unmistakable at the First Continental Congress. The extent to which pressure for modification or repudiation was taking hold in 1774 and 1775 is often forgotten, given the
über
-focus on Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations,
not published until 1776.

Let Edmund Burke signpost Britain’s confidence of the 1760s: “[Our] object is wholly new in the world. It is singular: it is grown up to this magnitude and importance within the memory of man; nothing in history is parallel to it…In this new system, a principle of commerce, of artificial commerce, must predominate.”
¹⁵
Here Burke is glorying in the intersection of mercantilism and empire so triumphant in 1763. If the increasingly shaky Anglo-American framework could be called constitutional, the shifting tectonic plates were economic.

The tremors most discussed in Britain and America—threatened boycotts, free trade, and no more commodity enumeration—provided political seismography for a relationship coming undone. Britain’s demand for colonial subservience and the colonies’ insistence on self-determination were two sides of the same bright coin of imperial growth. So, in a sense, were the two countries’ diverging prescriptions. Policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic were betwixt and between.

Although the evolution of economic ideology in Britain and mainland Europe is beyond our story, British perspectives on the economic changes roiling the English-speaking Atlantic world of 1775 could not be more relevant. American interpretation of the backdrop to Revolution too often neglects Britain’s own interests and apprehensions. Great imperial and economic hubris was interspersed with bouts of political and global angst.

The hubris was understandable. During the 1756–1763 war years, Britain achieved military conquest and unprecedented territorial expansion while maintaining rapid trade expansion, a rare combination. Despite near-global conflict, the nation’s imports were up 39 percent. By one calculus, during
the eighteenth century as a whole, imports grew by over 500 percent while exports, driven by manufactures, rose by some 560 percent.
¹⁶
Although the 1780–1800 period saw the biggest spurt, the takeoff between 1750 and 1775 was also momentous. As Burke’s comments underscore, these were decades during which commercial priorities came to the fore in Parliament. The importance of merchants and manufactures burgeoned, and notable political figures from Whigs like Pitt, Rockingham, and Shelburne to ministerial stalwarts like George Grenville concurred that manufacturing, trade, and commerce had become the new guideposts for imperial decision making. Their individual affirmations constitute striking testimony.
¹⁷

The related angst was also notable. Perhaps British power had peaked in 1763, so that France and Spain would fare better in a new war. Edward Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
published in 1776, raised disquieting analogies. And if the population and resources of the North American colonies were essential to Britain—a view shared by European mercantilists and French foreign ministers—how much wealth and power would be lost if a rebellion succeeded?

By 1774, the king’s ministers were aware of the dissonance between upholding imperial authority and the periodic concessions needed to stave off transatlantic confrontations. New Englanders and Virginians were beginning to dispute not just Parliament’s right to tax but its right to regulate American commerce. The prospect of colonists stepping up their own textile production spurred Parliament in 1774 to prohibit the export of utensils used in cotton and linen manufactures.
¹⁸
The Boston-based customs commissioners, on the other hand, advised London against passing any trade law modification until “the Authority of Government” could be restored.
¹⁹
We must remember that as 1774 ended, Patriot committees in the major seaports were taking over supervision of shipping.

The Crown’s control over land policy in North America was also breaking down, especially in the southern colonies. When restrictive new rules for making land grants and raising quitrents were published in 1774, certain exceptions were allowed, but royal governors doubted they could carry out the instructions. Patriot committees simply scoffed. In January 1775, the “Darien Committee” in St. Andrew’s Parish, Georgia, fit most of its outrage into a single paragraph. The committee resolved that “shutting up the land offices, with the intention of raising our quitrents…is a principal part of the unjust system of politics adopted by the present ministry, to subject and enslave us, and evidently proceeds from an ungenerous jealousy of the
colonies, to prevent as much as possible the population of America, and the relief of the poor and distressed in Britain and elsewhere.”
²⁰
Reasoned discussion was lapsing.

Law could no longer bridge the gap, partly because of legal rigidity in Britain but also because of too many varieties of law in America.

Constitutions: Competing British and American Legal Concepts

William Shakespeare has been thought snide for having one character in
Henry VI
say, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” However, complaints about excessive legalism have been a staple in English-speaking countries, and the eighteenth century was another such period. The torrent of new law and regulation that began in England during the 1750s produced widespread complaint on both sides of the Atlantic over a lack of coordination and standardization—and especially over the expense and complexity of the judicial process.
²¹

With respect to too much lawyering as a bone of contention between Britain and the thirteen colonies in the 1770s, American constitutional historians have argued that the transatlantic quarrel nailed itself into a box by becoming
too
legal—too unremitting and inflexible in interpretation.
²²
This rigidity was related to the larger problem, but also distinct from it.

By one critique, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice, and other Crown legal advisers were to blame for being unable to move relations with America beyond a narrow legal interpretation. They were indeed constrained by a doctrine, entrenched over the generations following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that upholding Parliament’s sovereignty within Britain required enforcing the subordination of the colonies to that body.
²³
There was no leeway. For them to owe loyalty only through a symbolic king, a simple relationship later posited for Canadian and Australian dominion status, was not a politically acceptable premise in the 1770s. The royal excesses curbed in 1688 were too recent a memory; Parliament had to be upheld.

In the process, though, upholding Parliament became “too legal” in the late 1760s and 1770s. The trap was that “the Americans first had to acknowledge the ‘right’ before there could be a renunciation of ‘the exercise.’” Had the Americans somehow been able to acknowledge an abstract parliamentary supremacy, “Parliament could then have devised a constitutional mechanism to check any threat from the crown should the colonies provide
the king with revenue. But the Americans could not acknowledge without risking their constitutional security to the whims and changing politics of some future parliament.”
²⁴

Across the Atlantic, however, the colonies were also “too legal” but in a different way. The thirteen colonies operated under so many varieties and concepts of law that they believed they could deny Parliament, as well as pick and chose from alternative legal theories. A second Shakespeare, had one been at hand, could have written a play mocking lawyers on both sides as launching “the War of the Two Constitutions” and been no more flippant than the character in
Henry VI.
Summarily put, the two English-speaking nations had developed substantially different legal and governmental cultures, resulting in an unbridgeable pre-Revolutionary divergence. It is certainly plausible to discuss the
constitutional
origins of the American Revolution, not merely the supposed
ideological
ones.

The unwritten British Constitution circa 1775 had, in retrospect, become rigidified around the doctrine of complete and unmitigated parliamentary supremacy, an insistence that did indeed go back to the Glorious Revolution. King George III himself swore a coronation oath to uphold Parliament. Since 1707, no monarch had been permitted a veto. Sensible enough in the abstract, by rigid judicial interpretation parliamentary supremacy had already produced some dubious rulings and mandates within Britain. One case held that the king could not even lawfully proclaim a temporary tax in the West Indian island of Grenada lest this somehow restore the dangerous prerogative power. By another determination, the London Common Council could obtain no remedy from the king—the remedy sought was a royal dissolution of Parliament—whatever the alleged arbitrary nature of the legislators’ acts.
²⁵
Parliament was now more absolute than a king had ever quite been under common law.

Under Britain’s constitution, the onetime common law “rights” of Englishmen, in earlier days invocable against
royal
transgression, no longer applied as against
Parliament.
Most Americans of the Patriot faction, however, still cherished an older—and strictly speaking no longer valid—view rooted in the old common law: that English liberties could be asserted against
any
institutional transgressor. A few British lawyers still agreed with the old interpretation—one was Lord Camden, the former attorney general. Similarly, in America many Tories upheld complete parliamentary sovereignty. But on the whole, the two peoples separated by the Atlantic held different views of the British Constitution and the extent to which it did or
did not still enshrine common law verities about tyrants and the rights of Englishmen. If the tyrants were in Parliament, even the rights of Englishmen were no longer assured.

To further complicate matters, British officials, at home with unwritten constitutions, routinely referred to the “constitutions” of Massachusetts or New York, and some would have used the word to describe the legal systems in the other eleven provinces. In fact, individual nuances abounded. Colonies that still retained seventeenth-century charters from the Crown—by 1775, only Connecticut and Rhode Island—regarded their charters’ commitments as binding and beyond Parliament’s power to suspend or repeal. At that, Parliament essentially laughed. Jurisdictions like Virginia and South Carolina, citing original charters from King James or King Charles that granted boundaries extending to the Pacific, loosely regarded those territorial commitments as persisting in 1775, even though both had since become royal colonies. Here, too, Parliament scoffed. Prominent American leaders like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, in turn, periodically hypothesized that their provinces were tied to Britain through the king, not Parliament. Under British law, parliamentary supremacy made that impossible, whatever fanciful interpretations might be entertained in America.