1775 (40 page)

With respect to individual denominations, historian Ruth Bloch summarized that “the popular support for the American Revolution came overwhelmingly from Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Southern lay Anglicans, almost all of whom can loosely be described as Calvinists. To be sure, the Revolution also enlisted the support of a number of religious rationalists, particularly among the urban elite and the Southern gentry, but on a more popular level, the religious faith of American revolutionaries was in the main Calvinist. The non-Calvinist Quakers, Methodists and Northern Anglicans drifted disproportionately towards neutrality and Loyalism, and typically Calvinist pre-occupations underlay much of the development of Revolutionary ideology.”
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This hardly establishes Calvinism as a principal ideological or theological driver of the American Revolution. But it might have been among the six or eight most important.

Conspiracy: The Irrefutable Undercurrent

Inasmuch as George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all commented from time to time about a deep-seated British conspiracy to deny colonial liberties, the question is not about whether these suspicions were widely held, but
why
—on what grounds, and with what ultimate importance to the American Revolution?

Bernard Bailyn, the distinguished former professor of early American history at Harvard, put it simply back in 1967: “We shall have much disbelief to overcome. For what the leaders of the Revolutionary movement themselves said lay behind the convulsion of the times—what they themselves said was the cause of it all—was nothing less than a deliberate design—a conspiracy—of ministers of state and their underlings to overthrow the British constitution, both in England and in America, and to blot out, or at least seriously reduce, English liberties.”
⁴⁰

Use of the term
conspiracy
and its sub rosa equivalents grew during the 1760s. Multiple sore points—fear of episcopacy; the Stamp, Sugar, Currency, and Townshend Acts; the Proclamation Line; anger over customs crackdowns and the stationing of so many troops in Boston—all fed the
perception of plotting and hostile motivation that seemed beyond coincidence. Among Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the lawyer from Massachusetts took his own sense of conspiracy back furthest—to the 1760s. Full belief in deliberate British malice only crystallized in May, June, and July 1774 as word arrived of the Coercive Acts: the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, the Quartering Act, and the equally objected-to Quebec Act. With these, said Adams, Britain “threw off the mask.”

Jefferson agreed. Although “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day…a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” Washington, in the Fairfax Resolves he penned with George Mason in the summer of 1774, perceived London as “endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us.” In a private communication, he wrote that “I am as fully convinced as I am of my own existence that there has been a regular, systematic plan to enforce [these measures].”
⁴¹

The extended history of Anglo-Saxon belief in conspiracy is also helpful. Bailyn harks back to the late seventeenth century: “Almost—but not quite—all of the ideas and beliefs that shaped the American Revolutionary mind can be found in the voluminous writings of the Exclusion Crisis [1679–1681] and in the literature of the Glorious Revolution that in effect brought that upheaval to a peaceful conclusion.”
⁴²
These last decades of the seventeenth century, and the first three of the next, he says, were the political and literary maturation years of the “Opposition” thinking and pamphleteering led by men like John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and the Viscounts Molesworth and Bolingbroke that made such a strong impression in pre-Revolutionary America.
⁴³
“Opposition by its very nature, therefore—by the very structure of the political system—fed the fears of conspiracy,” and did so on both sides.
⁴⁴

Bailyn identified eighteenth-century England’s institutional bogeyman: “the bloated Leviathan of government they [Trenchard, Gordon, et al.] saw developing—it was in this populist cry against what appeared to be a swelling financial-governmental complex fat with corruption, complaisant and power-engrossing…that English liberal thought took on the forms that would most specifically determine the outlook and character of the American Revolution and that thereafter in vital respects would shape the course of American history.”
⁴⁵

These pages, although mindful of shared thinking, are principally concerned with the emergence and scope of belief in conspiracy on the American side. In sharpening colonial outrage, “conspiracy” would have resonated with more than what Bailyn described as “the abstruse points of constitutional law that…did not determine the outcome one way or another,” or “the abstract ideas of Locke” or the “noble” but less than central ideas of the Enlightenment.
⁴⁶
Even American sympathizers in Parliament sometimes blamed backstage machinations. One of them, Lord Camden, spoke about the ministry having formed a conspiracy against English liberties. On the other hand, George III, in his October 1775 speech to Parliament condemning the rebellion, accused its American architects of a “desperate conspiracy.”
⁴⁷
It was a shared heritage.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Bailyn wrote his influential analysis—
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
won a Pulitzer Prize in history—conspiracy notions had again become widespread in America because of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs misadventure, Watergate, and accompanying suspicions about covert activity in institutions like the CIA and the FBI. For the not widely known Harvard professor to have written books tying the Founding Fathers and the Revolution to belief in conspiracies could have courted attack, not least from Consensus historians, congressmen from Oklahoma, and Fourth of July orators. Caution might have been wise.

Historically, though, if American thinking has a rich vein of conspiracy theory and paranoia, no small part of it bespeaks an English, Welsh, and Scottish heritage of many centuries. It is misleading to begin with the exclusion crisis of 1679–1681; nor should we start with Henry VIII and the Reformation, although that upheaval was an accelerator. The fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses were little more than an extended series of plots and conspiracies—witness Shakespeare’s own historical settings. During that same century, the relationship between England, Burgundy, and France was so fraught with secret alliances and betrayals that plot-manic King Louis XI was known as the “universal spider.” After the Welsh House of Tudor essentially replaced Lancaster in seeking the overthrow of two Yorkist kings, Edward IV and Richard III, the connivance only intensified. At this point, Wales—personified by Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII—joined the Scots in plotting with the French to keep the English embroiled.

Once the Tudors were on the English throne, both Henry VII and
Henry VIII were so concerned about rivals, pretenders, and conspiracies that they executed even remote claimants. The Reformation in England owed more than a little to Henry VIII’s quest for a queen able to bear a male heir and his coveting of the riches of the Catholic Church. As religious conflict grew, plotting in western Europe jumped to a new multilevel, with England playing a major role under Catholic Queen Mary and Protestant Queen Elizabeth alike. The plots mounted against (but also by) England can be followed in detail by reading the many books on the Elizabethan secret service under Lord Walsingham.
⁴⁸

The early-seventeenth-century Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, were also schemers, sometimes with France and Spain. The Puritans were likewise given to seeing plots everywhere, with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 being topped in the 1630s by the Antrim Plot, endless Popish plots, and the “army plot” of Charles I in 1641.
⁴⁹
As serious civil war developed in 1642, both sides saw conspirators behind every corner—and with considerable justification. Parliament had an active secret service under John Thurlow, and royalist counterconspirators collected in the shadows of an organization called the Sealed Knot.

My 1999 book,
The Cousins’ Wars,
hypothesized a psychological continuity between the three major English-speaking civil wars. All three eras included a considerable (although decreasing) intensity of conspiracy charges relative to (1) political and Popish plots and fear of Catholicism or Episcopacy; and (2) concern about treason and about tyranny and liberties being at risk. Such charges came from both sides. Obviously, these themes were more important in the English Civil War than in the American version two centuries later. The American Revolution fell in the middle.

In recent decades, complaints have grown over an interpretation of the “ideological” origins of the Revolution so narrow as to exclude religion and economics. In fact, both influences seem irrefutable, if not necessarily dominant. “Conspiracy” might have been a factor in giving ideology a greater than usual relevance and zest.

Divergent Empires of American Minds

In a closing assessment of revolutionary psychologies, one further cleavage should be attributed to diverging imperial visions. To call this ideology seems strained. It has very little to do with statutes or rights but represents different pathways of imagination. On one side were those who looked over
the Appalachians to a Mississippi Valley frontier, or westward across a continent sure to be spanned, or toward a distant China trade already much envisioned in Massachusetts. This was the empire of the American mind, and if it was guided by profits expected in Canton, furs to be trapped in the Northwest, the rewards of trans-Ohio land speculations, or the vastness of a Louisiana to be wrested from France or Spain, those vistas had sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English antecedents in the westward ambitions of Richard Hakluyt, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and many others.

Most opinion molders in our four vanguard provinces generally fit this category. Over four, five, or six generations, their forebears had principally looked westward (sometimes northward or southward), fighting Indians, French, and Spanish in Western Hemisphere campaigns that, at least until the 1720s or 1730s, rulers in London found of little interest or were unwilling to fund. If the first two Hanoverian kings, German-born George I and German-born George II, were preoccupied with German states, German wars, German wives, and German mistresses and therefore treated North America with “salutary neglect,” to incipient nationalists that was fine.

The major colonies had managed their own expansion and were usually happy to be left to their own devices. If George II had been little known, he was well regarded. The thirteen colonies boasted 40 or 50 counties and towns named for Hanover, Brunswick (Braunschweig), Mecklenburg, Lunenburg, King George, Prince George, (Queen) Caroline, (Queen) Charlotte, (Prince) Frederick, and the like. Salutary neglect had been popular. Most of the Americans who by 1775 could be described as expansionists—upholders of colonial military expeditions, strong militias, local manufactures, smuggling when needed, and aggressive land companies—were Patriots of growing mind to break with an empire realigning its intentions to tax, confine, and police North American aspirations. Several historians have developed the portrait of expansionism, as well as its opposite, nonexpansionism. Many of those opposed took a neutral or Tory stance in 1775, especially if their appointive or commercial interests looked back to the mother country.

A considerable minority did prefer this Atlanticized and Anglicanized imperial model. They embraced the grand British Empire that had taken on such size and wealth over the prior quarter century. Within Britain, many of non-English ancestry had been especially happy to pursue its benefits. The Scots had done so with particular enthusiasm, gaining disproportionate roles in imperial government, in Canada and India, and among the
officers’ corps of the British Army. A majority of Scots in America shared that loyalty. Formerly French seigneurs and Catholic clergy in Canada joined in. Even Catholics in Ireland, especially prosperous ones, found the empire ready to make some economic and religious concessions. In America’s northern colonies, including New England, the Anglican Church had grown rapidly during the second half of the eighteenth century, especially among the mercantile, professional, officeholding, and landowning classes. Not a few imagined a new aristocracy tied to British religion, British commerce, Crown patronage, and London fashionability. Because these opportunities related to the existing empire, not the would-be American one, some of these Loyalists chose to flee between 1774 and 1776, as we will see in
Chapter 8
.

However, support for the existing far-flung British Empire, as opposed to a Patriot regime, had many more foundations than these. The economic basis of Loyalism was discussed in
Chapter 4
, but its cultural underpinnings were also substantial. Quakers looked to Britain for commerce and protection. Emigrants from German states allied to the House of Hanover had favorable views of Britain; likewise the Dutch Reformed who belonged to the conservative wing of the church that back in Holland was pro-British. Small ethnic and religious groups in the North American colonies often trusted the British Empire more than they did local Puritans and Scotch-Irish Calvinists. Within Massachusetts, the old Plymouth Colony had a higher ratio of Tories than the original Puritan Bay Colony. Black slaves with some education knew that freedom was more likely to come from courts in England than from courts in Virginia or South Carolina.

In short, two different visions of empire competed for American minds, and in sections of the middle colonies, deciding between them would tear local populations apart. In
Part II
we have examined the pre-Revolutionary circumstances of the thirteen colonies. Now
Part III
will turn to the major 1774–1775 battlegrounds—politics, commercial confrontation, preparation for war, and the initial theaters of military confrontation on land and at sea.