Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (9 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Franklin was certainly prescient, but he was essentially sketching out the future of America, not Britain. There is no doubt that he thought America would surpass Britain, and given his frequent bouts of irritation with the British regime in America, it is hard to doubt that he at least had a two-track option: Britain and America together become unquestionably the greatest power in the world and sort out governance between them; or America, the mortal threat of France to strangle English-speaking America in its cradle having been graciously removed, would achieve the same prodigies without the British. What he did not know, and was not generally known, was that Pitt would have fought to the last musket ball himself to keep Canada, and Louis XV and Choiseul felt themselves well shot of the unprofitable, inaccessible, unremitting New France that Jacques Cartier had allegedly called, on discovering it, “The land God gave to Cain,” and that Frederick the Great’s (and Catherine the Great’s) friend Voltaire dismissed as “a few acres of snow” (a description that rankles yet in Quebec, 250 years later). Even more improbably, the bountiful fisheries of Newfoundland caused Pitt to say that he would rather give up his right arm than a share of the fishing off the Grand Banks to France, and that he would surrender the Tower of London before he would give up Newfoundland. Pitt was not just concerned with fish, because access to fisheries was what bred sailors and created the personnel for a navy, and cutting France off from such fisheries would have severely crimped its ability to rebuild its shattered navy.
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11. THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR
 
Military fatigue and diplomatic confusion settled and thickened until the war finally ended. King George II died on October 25, 1760, and was succeeded by his young grandson, the preternaturally headstrong George III, who had no interest at all in Hanover and was opposed, partly from sharing his father’s dislike of his grandfather, to any British assistance there. It was to appease George II that Walpole and Pelham had propped up Hanover. George III achieved the appointment of his former tutor, the Earl of Bute, as northern secretary in charge of European continental relations (for which post he was completely unqualified), assuring friction with Pitt, who retained the Southern Department (all foreign affairs except Europe). Bute wanted to wind the war down and shared his master’s opposition to any involvement in continental wars.
In Europe in 1761, essentially the same familiar armies continued to mill about on the edges of Prussia in an increasing state of depletion and exhaustion. Choiseul managed in 1762 to bring Spain into the war against Britain, convincing the Spanish that now that Britain held the scepter of the seas, she would be poaching on the Spanish interests in Latin America next. (If true, that was all the more reason for Spain to have entered the war earlier, when she could have joined forces with a still navally viable France.) Faithful to a centuries-old alliance, Portugal rallied to England and declared war on Spain, which invaded its smaller neighbor. Again, the British sent an expeditionary force to help their protégé. Pitt had learned of the French-Spanish arrangement, and advocated a preemptive strike against the Spanish. The advice was rejected as improper under international law (which scarcely existed and when invoked was almost always pretextual), and from war-weariness. Pitt resigned from the government, leaving Bute preeminent under the mighty survivor, Prime Minister the Duke of Newcastle, now 36 years in cabinet. He was now having severe problems paying for the war, as the government was charged, in effect, 25 percent interest and was still two million pounds short on the last year, facing the possible requirement simply to print banknotes and endure inflation, a horrible political and social nightmare. Newcastle, too, was abruptly turned out by George III and Bute on May 26, 1762, ending the very long (41 years) dominance of the Walpole-Pelham Whigs, years of vast success for Britain, in war and peace, and all over the world.
The French army, in one of the longest droughts of victory in its history, was unable to get by or through the Hanoverians; Czarina Elizabeth died, and was replaced by her dull-witted German nephew, Peter III, who worshipped Frederick the Great and abruptly withdrew from the war, mediated peace between Prussia and Sweden, and threatened Austria, before being overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered, in 1762, with the presumed complicity of his formidable wife, Catherine the Great, in one of history’s most lop-sided marriages. She quickly restored the anti-Prussian slant of Russian policy.
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Frederick, who was a man of considerable culture, wrote a couplet about Catherine: “The Russian Messalina, the Cossacks’ whore, Gone to service lovers on the Stygian shore.”
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As negotiations dragged desultorily on, the well-traveled Monckton seized Havana on August 14, 1762. Once again, there were celebrations in the streets in England. Peace was finally secured by the craftiness of Choiseul, a clever negotiator and diplomat, if an unsuccessful war strategist. Spain would fight to the death rather than acquiesce in the permanent loss of Havana. Britain would have to be bought off with something comparable. An insufficiently generous peace could produce a parliamentary revolt, and bring back Pitt, who would trim France back to the Ile-de-France, if he could bribe enough European armies to do it. The national debt of Great Britain had increased from 74.5 million pounds in 1755 to 133.25 million in 1763; 10 times the year’s budget which was half deficit. This was almost more debt than Britain could bear without provoking taxpayers’ revolts in both the home islands and America, and a default and rampant inflation were both completely out of the question.
It had been a brilliant but almost Pyrrhic victory for Pitt. France was a larger and richer country than Britain, but it too had a financial problem, so the pressure was on Choiseul to produce a peace that would be accepted by Spain, which he had induced late into the war and was not gasping for money and was prepared to delay peace to get Havana back. Choiseul gave Louisiana to Spain, in exchange for Spain ceding to Britain the territory from Mississippi to Georgia in return for Havana. Since Louis and Choiseul had no interest in North America, that worked for everyone, and France took back her sugar islands, as well as the little Gulf of St. Lawrence islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, from which to service her fishing fleet, which was guaranteed access to Newfoundland fishing. France gave back Minorca but kept Pondicherry in India and the West African slave trading stations. Britain ruled North America and India. Everyone had what he wanted most and the Peace of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. Britain had the winning strategy, but in a perverse pattern that would be followed with other leaders who rescued it from wars that were going badly with Great Powers, it dispensed with the father of victory Pitt, as it would with his son for a brief peace with Napoleon, Lloyd George in 1922, and Churchill in 1945 (though not Palmerston after Crimea).
Five days later came the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Frederick the Great kept Silesia and Maria Theresa took back Saxony. Not for the last time, Germany had unleashed aggressive war, and not for the last time gained nothing tangible from it. Frederick promised to support Maria Theresas son as next head of the Holy Roman Empire. But he had established Prussia as a Great Power, and had given the world an astonishing and minatory demonstration of Germany’s military aptitudes and national tenacity. Furor Teutonicus was foreseeable (if not much foreseen). In Eastern Europe, Prussia was a doughty contender, but hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost in a war that, though it made Prussia a Great Power and enabled America to start thinking of independence, effected no significant changes to anything else in Europe. The 22-year-old George Washington had ignited a fateful conflict.
The Seven Years’ War had been an utterly stupid war for everyone except the British and the Americans. They had gained a world, with a debt time bomb attached to it, and had perfected the technique, soon to be absolutely vital for compensating for France’s much larger population and greater national wealth. France had surrendered much of the prestige she had enjoyed from Richelieu to Louis XIV. The zigzag of French decline had begun, with the most dismal war in its history, prior to the severe beatings it would suffer (110 and 180 years later) in two out of three contests with a united Germany. William Pitt had been the great war statesman, Frederick the Great the great commander, and the whimsical Philadelphian printer and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the great strategic prophet.
12. ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AFTER 1763
 
The removal of France from North America made Britain dispensable to the American colonists, and the heavy costs of the British victory in the Seven Years’ War and the increased cohesion the colonies achieved in the war altered the correlation of forces between Britain and America. The British did not notice this, but the more astute Americans did.
At first, all was well in Anglo-American relations, as the dispatch of the French was celebrated by both. As early as 1754, Franklin, renowned throughout the world as a scientist, and a prodigious talent in other areas as well, had exposed to his learned British friend Peter Collinson, a successful merchant but also a distinguished naturalist, his opinion that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one Whole, and not different states with separate Interests.” He had abandoned his previous hope, broached but frustrated at the Albany Congress earlier in 1754 (which had been convened at the request of the British Board of Trade, a government ministry), for colonial unity of purpose and action. He still favored a Grand Council of all the colonies, chosen by the individual colonial assemblies and presided over by a President General, who would represent the monarch of Britain and America. This was the heart of his plan at Albany. The Grand Council would operate independently of the British Parliament. This largely prefigured constitutional dispositions in America and the British Commonwealth, but Franklin made little progress with it at this stage. The prime minister, Newcastle, completely ignored the proposal when it was presented to him by the Board of Trade in 1754.
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When Franklin had persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to set up a colonial militia after the catastrophe on the Monongahela, and accepted a colonelcy in it, so great was the concern about Pennsylvania’s open western border that the British government vetoed the creation of the militia. British reaction to autonomous gestures in the colonies was reflexive and hostile. Franklin, an optimist, chose not to set too much store by that, and the ensuing war buried the hatchet between the British and their colonies (in the heads and torsos of their shared enemies). Even Franklin’s astounding and relentless powers of persuasion made few converts to his idea of trans-Atlantic organization or any devolution like it when he returned as representative (lobbyist, in fact) for Pennsylvania in London in 1764 after a brief absence. He had already been elected a member of the Royal Society and soon was awarded honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford (and had as much right to be called Doctor as Samuel Johnson). The British greatly respected Franklin and much liked him, but they did not connect their regard for him with any notion that the American colonies possessed any aptitude or representative desire for self-government. Franklin gleaned a notion of what he was facing in 1760, when Collinson arranged a meeting with the president of the King’s Privy Council, Lord Granville, one of the most influential members of the government. Granville wished to discuss the military scene in America, but added, in an unpromising aside, that “The king is the Legislator of the Colonies,” and his will was “the law of the land.” Franklin’s polite remonstrations made no headway.
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When Franklin returned to London in 1764, his chief preoccupation, bizarrely, was to bring Pennsylvania more directly under British rule, in order to emancipate it from what he rightly considered the bigoted autocracy of the Penn family. He had fought against this in various capacities in Philadelphia and construed it as his duty to seek the most likely possible easement of the arbitrariness of the Penns, and so called for the prerogatives of the existing legislature to be gutted, prior to the establishment of a federal colonial authority. His wishes would come to pass, but not as he had initially foreseen. One of Franklin’s closest British friends and one of the country’s leading solicitors, Richard Jackson, told Franklin shortly after the Treaty of Paris was signed that Britain intended to keep 10,000 troops in America, at the expense of the colonies. Franklin replied that the more costs Britain inflicted on the colonies, the less revenue it could expect to have remitted to Britain, recognizing at once the problem the victorious Empire faced. “It is not worth your while. The more you oblige us to pay here, the less you can receive there.” Six months later, Jackson, by then a member of Parliament, wrote to him that “200,000 pounds will infallibly be raised by Parliament on the plantations.” Franklin replied that he was “not much alarm’d.... You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burthens upon us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting yourselves.”
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He wrote to Collinson in the same line: “I think there is scarce anything you can do that may be hurtful to us, but what will be as much or more so to you. This must be our chief security.”
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13. THE STAMP ACT
 
Shortly after Franklin’s return to London in 1764, debate began on the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on printed and paper goods in the colonies, including even newspapers and decks of cards, and was so called because payment of the tax was certified by a stamp on the article taxed. Britain already had such a tax domestically. Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (not to be confused with Lord Granville), was leader of the government in the House of Commons. In presenting the measure, Grenville claimed the right of Parliament to levy taxes anywhere in the Empire, which was not contested by his fellow legislators, but he gave the colonies a year to propose alternatives. None did so, although Franklin himself did. Franklin achieved prodigies of diplomatic access and advocacy, but he had no legitimate status at all, and was merely an information service from Pennsylvania and other colonies that engaged him, to the British government, establishment, and public. Franklin’s proposal was to have Parliament establish a colonial credit office that would issue bills of credit in the colonies, and collect 6 percent for renewal of the bills each year, and these could be used as currency. Gold and silver currency were scarce in the colonies, as all transactions with Britain had to be paid in cash, and Parliament had forbidden the issuance of paper money in America. Franklin’s theory was that this would be an adequately disguised tax, and would not be unpopular in America because of the desire there for paper money to replace an inordinate mass of informal IOUs. It isn’t clear how the interest would have been collected, or how inflation would have been avoided, but at least it was creative thinking, and a start.

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