A History of the World (57 page)

Some believed a rupture was inevitable, though in the early 1770s they were a minority. Benjamin Franklin, on an intellectual journey that was distancing him from loyalty to the Crown, put his finger on a looming problem: one day the population of British America was bound to be larger and wealthier than that of the home islands. What would happen then? Would the capital of the British Empire have to shift from London to Philadelphia? Others wanted to remain loyal to the Crown but also to enjoy the maximum freedom to trade without levies, to agree local laws without reference to London, and to take native land without worrying about global treaties.

There is little doubt that, had the king’s ministers trodden even more warily, not only repealing unpopular taxes but accepting limits to their power in the new colonies, then the rebellion could have been postponed for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, plenty of smaller mistakes were made. Had British soldiers not responded to humiliating taunts and goading by opening fire and killing protesters in the ‘Boston massacre’, then that city would not have been the cauldron of anti-British feeling that it became. Had Lord North’s government not responded by passing the so-called Intolerable Acts to repress Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, the colonies would not have retaliated with their own congresses or combined in the first Continental Congress. Had Britain not then sent more and more troops, provoking the creation of militias, and had King George not arrogantly rejected the ‘olive branch petition’ from the Continental Congress in 1775 affirming American loyalty, full-scale war might have been averted. And indeed, had the British commanders in the 1776–81 War of Independence been better, and luckier, soldiers, then the British forces might have won, at least for a time.

Yet such ‘what if ?’s are not convincing. To return to Franklin’s
point, by the 1770s the thirteen colonies had a population of around 2.4 million, mostly British by origin, but Dutch and German too. This was still around four million fewer than Britain herself, but the population was growing fast and was far too substantial to be forever kept out of imperial politics. And ‘substantial’ means more than numbers. These were people with high levels of literacy, networks of political societies, their own lawyers, newspapers and pamphlets, and their own colonial level of politics. For the many British supporters of the American cause, these were British people no different from any others, and therefore with the same rights. British political philosophy was based on stories of resistance to tyrannical power, going back to medieval times. The argument about the right of representation, which thrummed through the coffee houses and drawing rooms of Philadelphia, Boston and New York, was understood just as clearly by many observers in London’s Cheapside, Bristol or Edinburgh.

How could colonies be properly represented in a Parliament that was six to eight weeks’ dangerous sailing away? They could not. Yet they knew their rights, and would have them. What was the alternative to independence? Even if the colonists had been given MPs at Westminster, the increase in their numbers in that vastly larger country would eventually have led to American MPs outnumbering British MPs, so that Essex or Hampshire would have been governed by the voting patterns of Pennsylvania and New York. Would that have been more acceptable to George III and his successors? The other possibility, that the Americans could have been encouraged to combine and form their own parliament, retaining loyalty only to the king – in effect, the Canadian or Australian option – is more plausible. But not much.

Instead, the outbreak of rebellion and war in 1775–6 was the best thing that could have happened, both for the colonists and their enemies. It was a relatively short, decisive and (for Britain) humiliating conflict rather than a long-drawn-out and very bloody one, as a later war would probably have been. It became a wider war when Spain, France and the Dutch combined with the Americans against Britain, sparking fears of invasion from London to Scotland. But this never happened. Driving the colonists together, beginning to loosen the individual states and shake them into a nation, the war inspired and energized what would become the world’s most successful political system. By forcing Britain to turn her imperial ambitions elsewhere,
the loss of the ‘first British Empire’ led to the acquisition of the far larger second one, centred on India. That, plus the bankruptcy of the French monarchy, caused partly by its financial support for the American rebels, led to Britain becoming a worldwide naval and imperial power and remaining so for the next 150 years.

Yet there were obvious losers, beyond the fifth or so of Americans who had supported the Crown, many of whom lost their property and some their lives. There were the African-Americans who fought with the British against the colonists because they feared that American independence would simply entrench slavery, and hoped that the British might abolish it. When the British Parliament did abolish the slave trade in its territory little more than thirty years after the American Declaration of Independence, their hopes were fulfilled. British observers made much of the oddness of Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, who both fought for liberty and kept slaves themselves. The great English writer and curmudgeon Samuel Johnson famously asked, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest
yelps
for liberty amongst the drivers of negroes?’

In 1750 there were about 236,000 blacks in the colonies; by 1810, there were more than a million slaves in the US.
¹⁶
But in a further strange historical twist, the French revolt in favour of liberty extended slavery in America: the ‘Louisiana Purchase’, which passed over from France to the US a vast stretch of the American hinterland, was agreed by Napoleon as a wartime necessity; and as we shall see later, it was in those lands that slavery would really flourish.

The most immediate historical injustice, however, leads us back to the men emptying tea-chests into the waters of Boston harbour – or rather, not to the men but to their chosen ‘disguises’. Some of them, as mentioned earlier, were dressed up as ‘Mohawks’, presumably with painted faces and feathers. We do not know for sure whether it
was
to disguise themselves, or to intimidate the sailors. What we do know is that the real Mohawks in fact mostly took the British side against the colonists – and were amongst the greatest losers from the war. Like the pro-British black Americans, they had sided with the imperial power out of desperate self-interest. It was, after all, the British Canadian treaty that had kept the colonists from pouring into yet more of their territory.

So who were they?

The Mohawks, who called themselves
Kanien’keha:ka
, or ‘people of the place of flint’, for they were great flint-cutters, using the material for their arrows and spears, were one of the most important Iroquois people of coastal America. Their lands ranged from today’s Upper New York State, through Vermont to southern Canada, and they had been trading in furs with the Dutch since the early 1600s. By the later part of the century they were British allies against the French, and when war broke out they almost all sided with the Crown again. This was not because of a strong affection for George III but because they knew very well what the colonists wanted – their traditional hunting land.

It was an old story. The first English colonists had barely survived wintering in the new land, Virginia. Depleted by disease and starvation and at times reduced to cannibalism, they had been saved by native help. But as soon as the numbers of colonists grew and they became better established, attacks on native people increased. It has been persuasively argued that the savage war waged by Elizabethan English armies against the Irish prepared them to view the native Americans as equally barbarous, even subhuman. In English eyes, there was not so much to choose between the cloak-wearing, bothy-dwelling Irish clans and the leather capes and wooden villages of the Americans.
¹⁷
These were people who rarely seemed to farm (though in fact the Massachusetts natives did farm), so did they not deserve to lose their land? By 1608, just a year after the first settlers arrived, ‘Indian’ leaders were protesting: ‘We hear you are come from under the World to take our World from us.’

By the 1620s open warfare had broken out, the colonists being able to use firepower to destroy native villages. Tribe after tribe was driven back, killed by new diseases, starved and attacked.

The success of the thirteen colonies was built on the back of the destruction of native peoples, who were culturally quite unready for an economy based on private property and settled farming. Earlier in this book, we saw how counter-intuitive and difficult the shift from hunter-gathering to farming had been in Eurasia. There, it took many thousands of years. In America, native people were expected to make that shift in years or even months. In 1789, in a heart-breaking petition to Connecticut, the Mohegan people said that in times past their
forefathers had lived in great plenty: ‘When they wanted Meat they would just run into the Bush a little ways with their Weapons and would Soon bring home good venison, Racoon, Bear and Fowl . . . and they planted but little Corn and Beans and they kept no Cattle or Horses for they needed none.’ Now, however, they were forced to work the land, keep animals and build fences because the hunting grounds had gone. Only the strongest prospered, ‘and poor Widows and Orphans Must be pushed to one side and there they Must Set a Crying, Starving and die’.
¹⁸

In their shifting alliances and in their wars, the Mohawks like many other native Americans were merely trying to preserve enough hunting and fishing land to keep their traditional way of life. They knew they were giving ground, even if the Quebec treaty had bought them time. After being on the losing side in the War of Independence, they were forced to flee further west and north, into Canada. Inside the new United States, no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson wrote in the climactic year of 1776 that he favoured pushing the war into the heart of the Indian lands: ‘But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi. We would never cease pursuing them with war while one remained on the face of the earth.’
¹⁹

This was the true voice of the land-hungry young republic. Within a few decades of independence from Britain, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Cherokees were being ambushed, threatened, massacred, driven out and presented with meaningless treaties by settlers and their leaders, who demonized them as savages. The same fate would befall the people of the plains beyond the Mississippi, just as Jefferson had foretold – the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux and Pawnee. There had been a brief period when native Americans were romanticized or taken to European capitals to be gawped at. But once the logic of colonization and landgrab had begun, they had to be cleared out.

The fake Mohawks of Boston were rebelling for a combination of reasons. They had good reason to resent being taxed without being represented in London, and ‘liberty’ was more than a cant word. But as they looked forward to a more spacious, richer world of their own, free from the hierarchies and religious bigotries of Europe, they knew
it would be available only because another free people, the native Americans, were doomed. And they were not the only ones.

Noble Savages

The kidnap had been successful. It had been meanly carried out. A young British naval lieutenant leading a couple of boats filled with sailors, soldiers and convicts had come across some natives on the beach. They had held up some fat fresh fish, tempting the natives into the shallows. Two men eagerly took the fish and danced together, at which point they were seized and shackled. Others ran up to watch. The lieutenant later wrote that the noise of the men, the screaming of women and children on the beach and the situation of the ‘miserable wretches’ he had seized made it a most distressing scene, ‘by far the most unpleasant service I was ever ordered to execute’.
²⁰

One of those seized would escape relatively quickly. The other, Woolawarre Bennelong, would learn English, be taught to dress in thick cloth and leather, with buttons and buckles, and would even visit English spa resorts and London itself, attending theatre and concert performances and the House of Commons before returning home. He remains a famous, if ambiguous, figure in Australia to this day.

The kidnapping of Bennelong was part of one of the most bizarre collisions of peoples caused by the age of empire. On the one side were the English, Scots and Irish, a mélange of sailors, soldiers and criminals – men, women and children – who had survived a nightmarish sea voyage so they could be dumped as far away from Britain as it was possible to get. Apart from a few officers they were all, in their way, the victims of a revolution in the economy of the small northern island. In the English and Scottish countryside, the ancient life of the peasants, tending common land and able to gather firewood, kill game and feed their own animals, was finally ending. A more efficient way of farming would help feed the new factory communities. But it also drove huge numbers of the poor to the crowded cities, where many were driven to petty crime to survive. Some were hanged, some festered in small, filthy prisons; and some were expelled, ‘transported’ to a new world.

In that new world on the other side were somewhere between
750,000 and a million humans who had arrived in Australia as one of the earliest migrations from Africa, perhaps some fifty thousand years earlier, perhaps even earlier than that. They had made their way south along the coastlines of Asia, using land bridges that no longer exist, and had also made formidable sea crossings. They had found a continent with its own unique plants, and animals including marsupial lions, wombat-like creatures the size of hippopotamuses, and giant carnivorous kangaroos (which promptly disappeared).

Before the arrival of the European ships, native Australians lived in some two hundred and fifty nations, each with its own subtly different language, and composed of subsidiary tribes; they had a political system similar to that of native Americans and, presumably, to the Europeans and the Chinese in their hunter-gatherer phase. Australian hunter-gathering had not developed into farming, the soil being mostly thin and lacking the necessary grasses and vegetables to develop. Instead, they used fire-stick cultivation, burning back undergrowth to allow new growth; and had begun systems of canals, fishing-traps and winter settlement villages – and all this before the British invasion.