Conceived in Liberty (226 page)

Strengthening hard-line dominance over public opinion was a pamphlet published in 1775 by the eminent Tory literary critic Samuel Johnson. With his accustomed perceptiveness, Johnson, in
Taxation No Tyranny,
warned that the logical conclusion of the “libertine” and American hostility to taxation, was no taxation at all, or anarchy.

Prowar petitions, inspired by the government, denounced the “sophistical arguments and seditious correspondence” of “a few disappointed men” who were responsible for “deluding” the Americans into rebellion. The ministry propounded a similar line. Indeed, more serious than the imprisonment of John Horne was the arrest on a charge of treason of the radical alderman and leading London banker Stephen Sayre, whom Burke and other Whigs were refused permission to visit in prison. Similar treatment for the Whig leaders was hinted to be in the offing, though Sayre was eventually able to sue successfully for false arrest.

Having agreed to prosecute the war vigorously, North attempted to offer peace terms to the Americans. After a great deal of wrangling with Germain and the war party, he won an agreement in May 1776 to send as peace commissioners to America, Gen. Sir William Howe and his brother the Whig Adm. Richard Lord Howe, the newly appointed commander of the fleet in American waters. This wrangling was a waste of time, for the peace terms merely amounted to a demand for American
submission in exchange for instituting North’s rejected Plan of Conciliation and a plan to consider American grievances. There was not the ghost of a chance that the Americans would submit. As Professor Ritcheson comments: “The terms thus held out were those a victorious and reasonably benevolent mother country might have granted to discouraged and chastised rebels.”
*
But the Americans, of course, were neither beaten nor discouraged.

Lord North’s first task in prosecuting the war was to raise 20,000 men to send to the American colonies. Rather than annoy the British people by raising the troops at home, he determined to use Britain’s vast wealth to hire mercenary troops from other governments. He turned first to Russia, which had been substantially helped by Britain to defeat Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. Russia had installed King Stanislaus as its puppet ruler in Poland, and in 1768 the liberal Polish country party, or Confederation of Bar, led by Counts Joseph and Casimir Pulaski, rose in rebellion against the king. By 1772, the Polish rebellion was crushed, and Poland suffered the loss of one-third of its territory and half of its population in the First Partition by Russia and Prussia. Turkey had decided to aid the Polish rebels, earning the belligerent attention of Russia. But Russia’s gratitude to Britain for its aid in the war had cooled. The German-born empress Catherine the Great had come strongly under the influence of Prussia, and Frederick the Great of Prussia was peeved at Britain for what he considered unsatisfactory peace terms after the Seven Years’ War. After much backing and filling and seeming agreement, Catherine finally refused Britain’s request.

North turned next to the Dutch. Ever since the accession to the English throne of William of Orange in 1688, the Dutch House of Orange had been subservient to Great Britain. They had been governed during the first half of the eighteenth century by the libertarian Republican party, which pursued a policy of thoroughgoing decentralization, minimal government, and profitable neutrality in Europe’s wars. During the War of Austrian Succession, Britain had engineered a coup by the House of Orange; the Republic was overthrown, and William IV of Orange was installed as
Stadholder
of the Dutch provinces. Now Great Britain asked the Dutch to supply the needed troops, specifically the “Scotch Brigade.” (This brigade originally consisted of Scotsmen, but was now largely comprised of Walloons from the southern Netherlands). The House of Orange was, of course, willing to agree; but the Prince of Orange was by no means the autocratic ruler of Holland, and the republican-led assemblies
of most of the provinces vetoed the scheme. Eloquent opposition to providing the troops was expressed by John Derk, who, citing English depredations upon the sea and upon Dutch commerce, declared that the Americans were contending for their liberty just as the Dutch themselves had fought for their independence as rebels against Spain in the late sixteenth century.

Leading the successful opposition to troop-aid to Britain in the interior Dutch province of Overijssel was a man destined to become one of the most important figures in the international revolutionary movement in the near future: the nobleman J. D. van der Capellen tot de Pol, who broke precedent by making public his views in the secret discussion within the provincial estates. Van der Capellen, who also led the movement to abolish
corvée
servitude by the peasants of the province, was in contact with British radicals and was soon to correspond with the revolutionary governors of Connecticut and New Jersey.

The substantial number of republican merchants in the Dutch provinces also expressed their opposition to British dictation by happily engaging in “illicit” trade with the rebellious Americans and with the French, St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies serving as a crucial entrepôt in the American trade.

Twice rebuffed in their search for mercenary troops, the British now turned to some of the petty princes of western and southern Germany who were always eager to augment their incomes by renting out their troops. In January 1776, Britain received into its service 30,000 German mercenaries from six principalities, including Hesse and Brunswick, of which three-fifths came from Hesse-Kassel.
*
While some of these German troops were mere hired killers or soldiers of fortune, many were imbued with deep sympathy for the American cause, proving to be reluctant fighters at best and often deserting outright to the American ranks.

In their discontent the German troops at least partially reflected a wave of enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause that was sweeping the intellectuals of Germany. The Enlightenment had deeply penetrated into German thought, and Rousseau and Voltaire were read as widely in Germany as in America. The rights of man were keenly admired, and the German intellectuals saw with enthusiasm that here was a new type of war, a war for liberty, a revolutionary war for an ideal very different from the familiar European war of mercantilistic and dynastic plunder.

The rental of the troops to counter-revolutionary England ignited a torrent of protest in Germany. The German poets were in the forefront of the protest, including the young poets Goethe and Schiller. The poets
were moved to use the American struggle for liberty to protest directly or obliquely against their own petty despotisms. The poet Johann Voss called courageously for Germans to “drain the cup of tyrant’s blood to triumph.” Leading the campaign was the romantic poet and newspaper editor of Wurttemberg, Christian F. D. Schubart, who had recently founded a lively paper to help launch Germany’s political press. Also avidly enthusiastic for the American Revolution was the poet Johann Georg Jacobi, who hailed the Americans as really battling against despotism in
all
countries; an editor of a sentimental women’s magazine, Jacobi rhapsodized over revolutionary activities by the women of Pennsylvania. Another prominent romantic libertarian poet of the revolution was Christopher M. Wieland, former jurist and professor of philosophy, who founded
Der Teutsche Merkur,
the most lively and popular—and most politically oriented—paper in Germany.

Schubart and Jacobi were soon suppressed by their respective princes, but Wieland carried on, and he was joined in advocating the American cause by more sober thinkers. These writings included a constitutional defense of the American case and of American smuggling, and an attack on the Navigation Acts by Jakob Mauvillon, professor of military science at Kassel. Mauvillon was greatly influenced by the first modern economists, the French physiocrats, who had evolved a rigorous libertarian theory that included a commitment to a strictly laissez-faire economy and to the natural rights of man. Mauvillon declared the lesson of the American revolution to be that, to avoid revolution, the German states must abolish the statist repressions at home, including “religious intolerance, monopolies, guilds, taxes on agriculture, and... economic burdens on trade and commerce.” Mauvillon’s physiocracy, in turn, influenced his colleague, the statesman and economist Christian von Dohm, who became the political commentator for Wieland’s
Merkur.
Von Dohm criticized the vicious trade monopoly of the British mercantilist system, and pointed out that American independence would be a great boon to the world if only because it would smash this monopoly. He thereby summed up the German—indeed the European—radical hopes for the American Revolution: its success would “create new routes for trade, new types of industry, new connections between nations in various parts of the world.... It can give wider circles of influence to the Enlightenment, new keenness to popular thought, new life to the spirit of freedom.”
*

*
Curtis P. Nettels,
George Washington and American Independence
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), p. 107.

*
George Rudé,
Wilkes and Liberty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 192.

**
Ibid.,
p. 192.

*
Charles R. Ritcheson,
British Politics and the American Revolution
(Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 207.

*
Of the 30,000 troops, 7,500 were to perish during the war, either in battle or of disease; of the remaining 22,500, 5,000 were to desert to settle in the United States.

*
Quoted in the important article by Elisha P. Douglass, “German Intellectuals and the American Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(April 1960), p. 216.

English Whigs and radicals put up a gallant fight in Parliament in early 1776 against the hiring of mercenaries, but to no avail; as a result, sentiment in America for independence increased greatly. To the Americans the hiring of the German mercenaries—generally called “Hessians”—was proof that Britain would treat them as aliens and foreigners.

From observing British reactions, General Lee and the other radical leaders in the Continental Army had already been convinced of the necessity of independence. Lee began to pepper congressmen with urgings of greater militancy. In early October 1775 he wrote to the receptive John Adams: “Now is the time to show your firmness. If the least timidity is displayed we are all ruined.... You ought to begin by confiscating... the estates of all the notorious enemies to American liberty.... Afterward you should invite all the maritime powers of the world into your ports.” Thus he gave the call for open ports and the confiscation of Tory property, which, before long, became the key planks in the radical platform. In another letter, he put his finger on the main stumbling-block to American independence: despite the general willingness to denounce Parliament or the royal advisors, Americans had been reluctant to break with the symbol of the king himself. Now he could write that people “begin to suspect that the king is as bad as the worst of his ministry. To have advanced such a proposition last year would have been thought treason and impiety. Next year [he added prophetically]—if you will have patience—king and tyrant will be a synonymous term.”

Similarly, Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire asked why Congress did not have the courage to declare independence. Did they believe that
such a declaration would lead the British to “throw their shot and shells with more force than at present?” Sullivan insistently urged John Adams “to destroy that spirit of moderation which... if not speedily rooted out, will prove the final overthrow of America.” General Nathanael Greene wrote to a receptive fellow Rhode Islander, delegate Samuel Ward, on behalf of independence. And Gen. Horatio Gates was preaching independence so openly and enthusiastically as to astonish even Charles Lee.

Despite the fact that the inner logic of the accelerating conflict called for American independence, Congress was by no means ready to take such a radical step. Congressional foot-draging on the subject was in a large sense a function of opinions on independence in the respective colonies, for Congress itself was a creature of the individual provinces; even if it wanted to, it could not declare American independence unless the respective provinces desired to do so. Each of the provinces, it is true, had rapidly and spontaneously developed a network of revolutionary bodies which took over the functions of local and provincial government. In each case the royal executive and the royal governor had been quickly swept away so that only three royal governors remained in their provinces by the spring of 1776, and these had no political power whatsoever. By far the most dangerous of the three, William Franklin of New Jersey, was placed under house arrest in March 1776 and shipped to a Connecticut prison. The popular and quiescent Robert Eden of Maryland was shipped home during the same month, and John Penn, of Pennsylvania and Delaware, the last proprietary governor in the colonies, was sympathetic to the rebel cause and remained in Pennsylvania as a private citizen.

In each province, the colonial assembly, which was part of the old royal structure, was abandoned, replaced by elected provincial congresses, or conventions. These provincial legislatures retained the supreme legislative power of the colonial assembly as well as the supreme judicial power that had belonged to the assembly and to the executive. Of particular importance was the automatic liquidation during this process of the old bureaucratic executive that had been removed from all popular or democratic check. Replacing this ruling oligarchy were the legislatures themselves, which now appointed their own committees of safety, or “councils of safety,” which were totally subordinated to the elected legislatures. Philosophically, after all, the executive function is merely that of a hired hand to enforce the laws, so total subordination of the executive to the legislative power seemed the rational course. This conclusion was redoubled by the threat of oligarchic rule, cut off from direct popular check, a threat inherent in any independent executive power.