Colin Woodard (19 page)

This was not, unsurprisingly, the case in Greater Appalachia. These sprawling borderlands contained the most fervent and committed champions of
both
the patriot and loyalist causes. Each local area chose sides based on whom they saw as the biggest threat to their natural freedoms: the colonial elite on the coast or the British elite across the Atlantic. In Pennsylvania the Borderlanders wanted any excuse to march down to Philadelphia and topple the soft, Madeira-sipping elite there, perhaps putting an end to the Midlands as a separate culture; this made them enthusiastic patriots. In Maryland and Virginia, backcountry folk saw the British as their greatest enemy and threw their lot in with the Piedmont faction of Tidewater aristocrats. Farther south, however, the Borderlanders most hated the great lowland planters and saw the troubles with Britain as an opportunity to throw off their masters and settle old scores. Nowhere was this hatred as great as in North Carolina, where just a few years earlier the Tidewater elite had enthusiastically crushed the Regulator army. The Appalachian people were divided, but whatever side they fought for, their goal was the same: to vanquish their oppressors.
⁸

The Midlands wanted nothing to do with a revolution and, in fact, were quite happy with London's centralization effort. Their leaders did their best to stay out of the conflict altogether. Religious pacifism played a key role, particularly among the Amish, Mennonites, and Moravians who'd fled the horrors of war in Germany. Most Germans, wanting to be left alone and content with the status quo, saw no advantage in leaving the empire, which would likely give greater power to their unpleasant Scots-Irish and Tidewater neighbors. Quakers, who still had considerable influence over Midlands affairs, had little complaint with the monarchy, which had granted William Penn the charter that made their colony possible. Tolerant of other religions, they had no qualms about the increased influence of the Anglican Church, which many of their own sons and grandsons were joining. The promise of greater imperial control over the Midlands would spare them from having to take up arms in its defense, as some had been compelled to do when the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia a few years before. It would also protect them from their real enemies, the bigoted Yankees and, especially, the belligerent, expansive Borderlanders, who now formed a majority of Pennsylvania's population. As the revolution approached, Quakers declared their neutrality but carried on their business with the empire. The Midlands—southeastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and the northern parts of Maryland and Delaware—would be passively loyalist throughout the conflict, frustrating transplanted Philadelphians who supported the patriot cause. “The principles of Quakerism,” fumed the British-born ex-Quaker Thomas Paine, “have a direct tendency to make a man the quiet and inoffensive subject of any and every government which is set over him.”
⁹

New Netherland was the loyalists' greatest stronghold on the continent. In the Dutch settlement area—the three counties that now comprise Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island plus the Bronx, southern Westchester, and Manhattan—public opinion was overwhelmingly against resisting the empire. Both the Dutch and the British imperial elite who governed the province feared a revolution would cause themselves to be toppled from power and that much of New York would fall under Yankee control. Indeed, large swaths already were. Areas settled by Yankees—eastern Long Island, northern Westchester, rural Albany County, and the seven northeastern counties in the Green Mountains (
Verts monts
, the New French called them)—had followed the rest of Yankeedom into open rebellion. If the colonies revolted, everyone knew the province would descend into civil war and could very well be dismembered.
¹⁰

British officials had grounds to hope the slave lords of the Deep South would also remain loyal. The great planters were mostly Anglican, hostile to democratic ideas, and entirely dependent on the export of sugar and cotton for their livelihoods. Like the Tidewater gentry, they identified themselves as Normans or Cavaliers, with all those terms' Royalist overtones, and ran the lowlands of South Carolina, Georgia, and southernmost North Carolina as they pleased. Unlike their Chesapeake cousins, they were outnumbered by their slaves three to one and greatly feared any disruption that might give their property an opportunity to revolt. There was no talk of rebelling against the crown among their counterparts in the British West Indies, where British power was the best guarantee of internal and external security. But Deep Southern planters didn't live on an island and therefore had more room to maneuver. While they did express their disapproval of imperial efforts to increase their taxes and limit their authority, their protests were balanced against the need to keep what they called their “domestic enemies” in bondage. Planter Henry Laurens summed up the great planters' position in a letter to a friend in January 1775: they sought only “reasonable liberty” within the empire; “Independence is not [a] view of America . . . a sober sensible man wishes for.”
¹¹

Accordingly, the slave lords acted through their provincial assemblies to support boycotts of British goods and sat back expecting London to relent. “A bloodless self-denying opposition was all that South Carolina designed, and was all the sacrifice which, as she supposed, would be required at her hands,” a Charleston physician recalled of the sentiments there in early 1775. While the planters' own goal was extremely conservative—to avoid any change in the status quo—plenty of people in the colonies they controlled felt differently. In the backcountry, Borderlanders were eager to break the planters' monopoly on power and would be happy to take whatever side allowed them to do so. And in the lowlands, planters shuddered as rumors began circulating among their slaves “that the present contest [with Britain] was [about] obliging us to give them liberty.” The planters prayed the other nations wouldn't pull the continent into open warfare, for they knew their tyrannical system might not withstand a major shock. The “great part of our weakness,” a militia officer reported, “consists in having such a number of slaves among us.”
¹²

 

The First Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia in early September 1774, was the first time the leaders of the nations came together to coordinate policy across the colonies. The fifty-six delegates all knew that forging colonial collaboration wasn't going to be easy, not least because of negative stereotypes associated with one another's regional cultures. New Englanders were distrusted by the elites of New Netherland, Tidewater, and the Deep South for their commitment to equality. John Livingston, a delegate from New York City, left John Adams of Massachusetts with the impression that he “dread[ed] New England, the leveling spirit, etc.” Quakers had not forgotten how their ancestors had been tortured and executed by the Puritans. Many others feared the Yankees were scheming to seize control of all of British North America. “Boston aims at nothing less than the sovereignty of the whole continent, I know it,” a South Carolina planter told Adams's cousin, Josiah Quincy Jr., at a 1773 dinner party. “There is a certain degree of jealousy in the minds of some that we aim at total independency,” Sam Adams reported, “. . . and that as we are a hardy and brave people we shall in time rule over them all.” Quincy, for his part, found on a visit to the Deep South that the “luxury, dissipation, life, sentiments and manners of the leading people [made] them neglect, despise, and be careless of the true interests of mankind in general.”
¹³

Adams would famously recall that the subsequent rebellion expressed “principles as various as the thirteen states that went through with it.” They “had grown up under [different] constitutions of government,” their “manners, and habits had so little resemblance . . . their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect that to unite them in the same principles and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.” But while the differences Adams described were real, there weren't thirteen varieties represented in the revolution; there were six, and they didn't correspond to colonial borders.
¹⁴

Throughout the proceedings, representatives of the four New England colonies moved in lockstep with one another, backed by the delegates from Yankee-settled Suffolk County, Long Island, and Orange County, New York. Having been the ones to call the conference, they pushed for the other delegations to agree to a full embargo of British goods and an immediate complete ban on exports to Britain as well. The Yankees also wanted the other colonies to refuse to pay British taxes and to establish their own militia forces and provisional governments.
¹⁵

The Yankees' greatest allies were the representatives from the Piedmont section of Tidewater: Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, and George Washington of Virginia and Thomas Johnson of Maryland. Confident in their ability to rule independent states, they aligned with the Yankees and convinced their more moderate “old Tidewater” colleagues to join them.

The Deep South's delegates were far more ambivalent. Georgia had refused to send any delegates at all because, its leaders explained, elite opinion “seemed to fluctuate between liberty and convenience.” Four of South Carolina's five representatives to the Congress were fearful of taking steps that might result in a break with the empire. They opposed the proposed ban on exports and generally hoped that the boycott on British imports would convince London to back down.
¹⁶

True to stereotype, the New Netherland delegation was wracked by internal bickering. Of their nine delegates, five were against resisting London. The four revolutionaries were all men opposed to the imperial status quo in New York: two middle-class Dutchmen, a lawyer transplanted from Yankee-settled Orange County, and Philip Livingston, an Albanyborn, Yale-educated Presbyterian. The conservatives looked on these men as rustic, uncouth commoners. The New Netherland conservatives—who represented a majority of both the New York and New Jersey delegations—were proper gentlemen who wished to avoid open rebellion and outright independence, as they knew they would be unlikely to win many popular elections on account of heavy Yankee in-migration, especially in upstate New York. As distant commerce was the essential foundation of New Netherland's economic system, they also opposed the proposed boycotts of British trade but would ultimately be outvoted by delegates from the other nations.
¹⁷

Delegates from the Midlands were nearly unanimous in their timidity, regardless of whether they represented Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, or Maryland. Eleven of the thirteen Midlander delegates were opposed to armed resistance and believed Britain had every right to tax and govern its colonial subjects. The leader of the overall conservative movement at the Congress was Midlander Joseph Galloway of Philadelphia, who argued that intercolonial cooperation was impossible because the colonies were “totally independent of each other” in law, customs, and goals. He put forward an alternative to the Yankee strategy: the colonies would remain in the empire but would demand an “American legislature” which would share lawmaking powers with the British Parliament, with each body able to veto the other. While supported by conservative New Netherlanders, the plan was rejected by the Yankee, Tidewater, and Deep Southern delegates, who refused to transfer further control of what they explicitly termed their “countries” to a central authority.
¹⁸

Most revealing, the sixth nation was not represented at the Congress at all, though it held perhaps a majority of the population of Pennsylvania and both Carolinas. The colonial assemblies refused to allow Appalachia to participate, depriving the enormous region of any voice at the proceedings. The closest thing they had to a delegate was Thomas McKean, a fiery Ulster-Scots patriot from Philadelphia who represented northern Delaware at the meeting and foiled his Midland colleagues at every turn. In North Carolina, where Borderlanders formed a majority, two of three congressional delegates had played key roles in crushing the backcountry Regulators in 1771. Excluded from the proceedings in Philadelphia, Appalachian people reflexively opposed whatever position their respective provincial delegations took. Thus Pennsylvania Borderlanders became ardent patriots (in opposition to the passivity of the Midland elite), while the Carolina and Virginia backcountry became a stronghold of loyalism (in response to the cautious patriotism of the lowland oligarchs).

While the Congress did bring the other five nations together, it was as an alliance of treaty partners, not as a prelude to national unity. When the meeting adjourned in late October 1774, the diplomats had agreed to a joint boycott of British goods and to impose an export moratorium if London failed to back down by mid-1775. They endorsed a petition to the king in which they acknowledged his authority and begged him for redress of their grievances. The delegates returned home, waiting anxiously for the British response. “We wait to know,” a South Carolinian planter wrote that winter. “God knows we have little power to resist by arms.”
¹⁹

But the British ruling class had no intention of backing down to the colonials. By the time the export ban went into effect, the cemeteries of New England were already filling up with the bodies of Yankee and British war dead. The American wars of liberation had begun.

CHAPTER 11

I
n
Albion's Seed
(1989), historian David Hackett Fischer makes the case for there having been not one American War of Independence but four: a popular insurrection in New England, a professional “gentleman's war” in the South, a savage civil war in the backcountry, and a “non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle” spearheaded by the elites of what I call the Midlands. The four wars, he argues, were fought sequentially and waged in different ways and for different goals.