A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (14 page)

Britain’s empire had changed significantly, though, since the time of George’s ancestor King William, who had fought the first of the five colonial wars seventy years earlier. During the eighteenth century, George’s American colonial subjects had grown more distinct from their English brethren than even those independent Americans of the time of Queen Anne’s War. Whether in economics, material culture, dress, language, educational institutions, professions, religions, law, and governmental institutions, the colonials had become further radicalized and Americanized in the New World.
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George III neither admired nor approved of this independent spirit. But the conclusion of the French and Indian War brought him problems as well as opportunities, and he needed America’s full cooperation to meet the new financial demands on his government. William Pitt’s brilliant policies had achieved victory, but at a high price: Britain left the war saddled with a huge debt—£137 million, with £5 million in annual interest payments. At home, a new group of British politicians quite naturally opposed higher taxes following on the heels of their severe wartime privation.
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This was bad timing indeed, for now Britain possessed vast and costly territories stretching from southern Asia to Canada. The latter territory alone demanded a substantial military force to police the native Indian frontier and watch over sullen Frenchmen who now found themselves unwilling Britons. Pontiac’s Rebellion, a violent and widespread 1763 Ottawa Indian uprising, served as a grim reminder that the situation on the Canadian-American frontier urgently demanded a British standing army. But who would pay the bill?

Only the most myopic observer would argue that Americans had not benefited greatly from British sacrifice in the colonial wars and now, thought the royal ministers, the Americans ought to pay their share of the costs of Britain’s (and their own) glory. According to Americanized governmental beliefs, however, if the colonists were to bear new taxes and responsibilities, they had to have a
say
in their creation. The radical new view of law and politics could produce no other solution, and Americans’ belief in the power of the purse led quite naturally to their opposition to taxation without representation. These were challenges to George III’s authority that the king could not allow.

Farmers and Firebrands

T
he changes brought by the French and Indian War were momentous, certainly in the sheer size and unique character of the territory involved. (Historian Francis Parkman maintained that the fall of Quebec began the history of the United States.) British acquisition of the new territories carried a substantial cost for almost every party involved. England amassed huge debts, concluding, in the process, that the colonists had not paid their fair share. France likewise emerged from the war with horrific liabilities: half the French annual budget went to pay interest on the wartime debt, not to mention the loss of vast territories. Some Indian tribes lost lands, or were destroyed. Only the American colonists really came out of the seven years of combat as winners, yet few saw the situation in that light.

Those Indians who allied with the French lost substantially; only the Iroquois, who supported the British in form but not substance, emerged from the war as well as they had entered it.
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Immediately after the war, pressures increased on the tribes in the Appalachian region as settlers and traders appeared in ever-increasing numbers. An alliance of tribes under the Ottawa chief Pontiac mounted a stiff resistance, enticing the Iroquois to abandon the British and join the new confederacy.
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Fearing a full-blown uprising, England established a policy prohibiting new settlers and trading charters beyond a line drawn through the Appalachians, known as the Proclamation Line of 1763. There was more behind the creation of the line than concern about the settlers’ safety, however. Traders who held charters before the war contended they possessed monopoly powers over trade in their region by virtue of those charters. They sought protection from new competitors, who challenged the existing legal status of the charters themselves.
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Such concerns did not interest the Indians, who saw no immediate benefit from the establishment of the line. Whites continued to pour across the boundary in defiance of the edict, and in May 1763, Pontiac directed a large-scale infiltration and attack of numerous forts across the northern frontier, capturing all but Detroit and Fort Pitt. English forces regrouped under General Jeffrey Amherst, defeating Pontiac and breaking the back of the Indian confederacy. Subsequent treaties pushed the Indians farther west, demonstrating both the Indians’ growing realization that they could not resist the English on the one hand or believe their promises on the other.

Paradoxically, though, the beneficence of the English saved the Indians from total extermination, which in earlier eras (as with the Mongol or Assyrian empires) or under other circumstances (as in the aftermath of King Philip’s War) would have been complete. As early as 1763, a pattern took shape in which the British (and later, the Americans) sought a middle ground of Indian relations in which the tribes could be preserved as independent entities, yet sufficiently segregated outside white culture or society. Such an approach was neither practical nor desirable in a modernizing society, and ultimately the strategy produced a pathetic condition of servitude that ensnared the Indians on reservations, rather than forced an early commitment to assimilation.

Land, Regulation, and Revolution

By establishing the Proclamation line, the British not only disturbed aspiring traders and disappointed the besieged Indians, but also alienated many of the new settlers in the west. After all, many had come to the New World on the promise of available land, and suddenly they found it occupied by what they considered a primitive and barbarous people.
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Some settlers simply broke the law, moving beyond the line. Others, including George Washington, an established frontiersman and military officer who thought westward expansion a foregone conclusion, groused privately. Still others increasingly used the political process to try to influence government, with some mild success. The Paxton Boys movement of 1763 in Pennsylvania and the 1771 Regulator movement in North Carolina both reflected the pressures on residents in the western areas to defend themselves despite high taxes they paid to the colonial government, much of which were supposed to support defense. Westerners came to view taxes not as inherently unfair, but as oppressive burdens when incorrectly used.

Westward expansion only promised to aggravate matters: in 1774, Lord Dunmore of Virginia defeated Indians in the Kanawha River Valley, opening the trails of Kentucky to settlement. The white-Indian encounter, traditionally described as Europeans “stealing” land from Native Americans, was in reality a much more complex exchange. Most—but certainly not all—Indian tribes rejected the European view of property rights, wherein land could become privatized. Rather, most Indians viewed people as incapable of owning the land, creating a strong incentive for tribal leaders to trade something they could not possess for goods that they could obtain. Chiefs often were as guilty as greedy whites in thinking they had pulled a fast one on their negotiating partners, and more than a few Indians were stunned to find the land actually being closed off in the aftermath of a treaty. Both sides operated out of misunderstandings and misperceptions.
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Under such different world views, conflict was inevitable, and could have proved far bloodier than it ultimately was if not for the temperance provided by Christianity and English concepts of humanity, even for “barbarian” enemies.

Tribes such as the Cherokee, realizing they could not stem the tide of English colonists, sold their lands between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers to the Transylvania Company, which sent an expedition under Daniel Boone to explore the region. Boone, a natural woodsman of exceptional courage and self-reliance, proved ideal for the job. Clearing roads (despite occasional Indian attacks), Boone’s party pressed on, establishing a fort called Boonesborough in 1775. Threats from the natives did not abate, however, reinforcing westerners’ claims that taxes sent to English colonial governments for defense simply were wasted.
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Had westerners constituted the only group unhappy with British government, it is unlikely any revolutionary movement would have appeared, much less survived. Another more important group was needed to make a revolution—merchants, elites, and intellectuals in the major cities or the gentlemen farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas. Those segments of society had the means, money, and education to give discontent a structure and to translate emotions into a cohesive set of grievances. They dominated the colonial assemblies, and included James Otis, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry—men of extraordinary oratorical skills who made up the shock troops of the revolutionary movement.
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Changes in the enforcement and direction of the Navigation Acts pushed the eastern merchants and large landowners into an alliance with the westerners. Prior to 1763, American merchant interests had accepted regulation by the mercantilist system as a reasonable way to gain market advantage for American products within the British Empire. American tobacco, for example, had a monopoly within the English markets, and Britain paid bounties (subsidies) to American shipbuilders, a policy that resulted in one third of all British vessels engaged in Atlantic trade in 1775 being constructed in North American (mostly New England) shipyards. Although in theory Americans were prohibited from manufacturing finished goods, a number of American ironworks, blast furnaces, and other iron suppliers competed in the world market, providing one seventh of the world’s iron supplies, and flirted with the production of finished items.
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Added to those advantages, American colonists who engaged in trade did so with the absolute confidence that the Royal Navy secured the seas.
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England’s eight hundred ships and 70,000 sailors provided as much safety from piracy as could be expected, and the powerful overall trading position of Britain created or expanded markets that under other conditions would be denied the American colonies. As was often the case, however, the privileges that were withheld and not those granted aroused the most passion. Colonists already had weakened imperial authority in their challenge to the Writs of Assistance during the French and Indian War. Designed to empower customs officials with additional search-and-seizure authority to counteract smuggling under the Molasses Act of 1733, the writs allowed an agent of the Crown to enter a house or board a ship to search for taxable, or smuggled, goods. Violations of the sanctity of English homes were disliked but tolerated until 1760, when the opportunity presented itself to contest the issue of any new writs. Led by James Otis, the counsel for the Boston merchants’ association, the writs were assailed as “against the Constitution” and void. Even after the writs themselves became dormant, colonial orators used them as a basis in English law to lay the groundwork for independence.

Only two years after Otis disputed the writs in Massachusetts, Virginia lawyer Patrick Henry won a stunning victory against the established Anglican Church and, in essence, managed to annul an act of the Privy Council related to tobacco taxes in Virginia. Henry and Otis, therefore, emerged as firebrands who successfully undercut the authority of the Crown in America.
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Other voices were equally important: Benjamin Franklin, the sage of Philadelphia, had already argued that he saw “in the system of customs now being exacted in American by Act of Parliament, the seeds sown of a total disunion of the two countries.”
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Mercantilism Reborn

The British government contributed to heightened tensions through arrogance and ineptness. George III, who had ascended to the throne in 1760 at the age of twenty-two, was the first of the German-born monarchs who could be considered truly English, although he remained elector of Hanover. Prone to periodic bouts of insanity that grew worse over time (ending his life as a prisoner inside the palace), George, at the time of the Revolution, was later viewed by Winston Churchill as “one of the most conscientious sovereigns who ever sat up on the English throne.”
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But he possessed a Teutonic view of authority and exercised his power dogmatically at the very time that the American situation demanded flexibility. “It is with the utmost astonishment,” he wrote, “that I find any of my subjects capable of encouraging the rebellious disposition…in some of my colonies in America.”
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Historians have thus described him as “too opinionated, ignorant, and narrow-minded for the requirements of statesmanship,” and as stubborn and “fundamentally ill-suited” for the role he played.
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Worse, the prime minister to the king, George Grenville (who replaced William Pitt), was determined to bring the colonies in tow by enforcing the Navigation Acts so long ignored. Grenville’s land policies produced disaster. He reversed most of the laws and programs of his predecessor, Pitt, who had started to view land and its productivity as a central component of wealth.

To that end, Pitt had ignored many of the provisions of the Navigation Acts in hopes of uniting the colonies with England in spirit. He gave the authority to recruit troops to the colonial assemblies and promised to reimburse American merchants and farmers for wartime supplies taken by the military, winning himself popular acclaim in the colonies. Grenville, on the other hand, never met a tax he didn’t like, and in rigid input-output analysis concluded (probably with some accuracy) that the colonists were undertaxed and lightly burdened with the costs of their own defense. One of his first test cases, the Sugar Act of 1764, revived the strictures of the Molasses Act against which the Boston merchants had chafed, although it lowered actual rates. This characterized Grenville’s strategy—to offer a carrot of lower rates while brandishing the stick of tighter enforcement.
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The plan revealed another flaw of the British colonial process, namely allowing incompetents to staff the various administrative posts so that the colonials had
decades
of nonenforcement as their measuring rod. (Franklin compared these posts to the modern equivalent of minimum wage jobs.)
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Despite lower rates, opposition arose over the new enforcement mechanisms, including the referral of all smuggling cases to admiralty courts that had judges instead of juries, which normally handled such cases. Any colonial smuggler knew that the outcome of such a trial was less often in his favor, and complaints arose that the likelihood of real prosecution and conviction was higher under the new law. A second law, the Currency Act of 1764, prohibited the colonies from issuing paper money. When combined with the taxes of the Sugar Act, colonists anticipated that the Currency Act would drain the already scarce metallic money (specie, or gold and silver coins) from America, rendering merchants helpless to counteract inflation that always followed higher taxes.
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