Penguin History of the United States of America (20 page)

For the greatest achievement of the Virginian gentry was unquestionably political. It is possible to exaggerate its originality. Gentlemen in England
were equally monarchs of the countryside, and every community in the colonies was necessarily self-governing. But there is no denying that in Virginia, more than anywhere else, the theory and practice of American republicanism grew to maturity. The gentlemen of the colony were said to be ‘haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power’. The great planters and their families – Randolphs, Byrds, Harrisons -dominated the region; the lesser planters and white farmers moved obediently in orbit, and the franchise, being restricted to freeholders with at least a hundred unimproved acres (or twenty-five improved, with house), could not place power in dangerous – for example, in black – hands (though some black freemen voted as late as 1723).
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It was, in short, a highly class-structured society. The gentry expected to be consulted about the organization and politics of their communities; they served conscientiously if, in many cases, reluctantly, on the vestries, commissions of the peace and other institutions by which their hold on church and state was maintained, and treated the voters to rum punch
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and barbecued beef at election time, to make sure that the right men continued in command (it once cost George Washington £50 to be elected to the House of Burgesses). Officially Anglican, they allowed no bishop to challenge their control of ecclesiastical patronage; although a Crown colony, Virginia was really ruled by its assembly, the House of Burgesses, which, in an epoch when all the colonial assemblies were rising in power and vigour, had no rival for self-assertiveness. The ruling class had in a few decades achieved a position of unchallenged authority and had not yet bred out of its system, by marriage exclusively within a confined circle, the qualities of intelligence, drive and judgement which had brought it to the top. Its commonwealth was as much a model of the aristocratic republic dear to Montesquieu as Boston was a model of the city-state. The great planters were as casually certain of their right to make all important decisions without interference from above or below as they were certain of their benevolence and wisdom. If challenged, they would and eventually did rely on their self-evident maturity and skill to justify their desire to govern themselves and others. And within the aristocratic pale, all was equality, duty and responsibility.

Unhappily for the gentry, aristocracy was, in the eighteenth century,
showing signs of obsolescence. The most important slogan of the age was that of the ambitious, intelligent, educated young
bourgeois:
‘careers open to talent’. All the traditional justifications of aristocratic rule proved useless when challenged, in one nation after another, by men who desired and were able to take and wield power, whether intellectual, economic or political. It is true that all was not plain sailing for these new men. In England they had a hard time of it until the 1832 Reform Act, and later. In France it took three revolutions to displace the nobility. All the same, their monopoly of power was doomed, and nowhere more than in America. There, the urban gentry was by definition raw,
bourgeois
and
arriviste
, like the towns themselves; and even the tobacco aristocrats were new men. Their power and position were too recently gained, by methods too imitable, and were too completely undermined by economic failure, to create a permanent noble caste like those which held up progress in France and Germany. The tobacco barons were soon supplanted, in true American fashion, by men as energetic and as newly rich as their own grandfathers had been. Even their political practices worked against them, as a Pennsylvanian writer pointed out in 1776, saying that ‘a poor man has rarely the honour of speaking to a gentleman on any terms, and never with familiarity but for a few weeks before the election… Blessed state that brings all so nearly on a level! In a word, electioneering and aristocratical pride are incompatible.’ Finally, in order to defend their power from a challenge from above and abroad – from Britain and the British King – they had been obliged to become self-conscious and explicit republicans; they had found it necessary, as will be shown in the following chapters, to justify rebellion by appealing to the rights of man. Extreme emergency had produced an extreme remedy, one which was a powerful example to others besides gentlemen. It proved impossible to keep the slaves from English, Christianity and literacy for ever; soon they found friends whose consciences were newly awakened to the implications of their religious and political principles (many of the latter having been learned from the Virginians); and in due course it was discovered that the rights of man were seditious. They undermined George Washington’s Virginia as thoroughly as they had undermined George III’s empire, and the leadership of the South passed, disastrously, to South Carolina, where men were still growing rich by slavery and were not ashamed to admit the force on which their political and social system rested. Men were still living who remembered Jefferson when, in 1861, a war broke out between those who adhered to his principles and those who adhered to his practice. Thus the Virginian formula was exposed as self-contradictory.

Nor was that all. It cannot be denied that Virginia was based on slavery; equally, it was based on race-prejudice. From the beginning of the trade slavery and racism had gone together. It is impossible to say that either came first. The Portuguese, in carrying the slave-trade into the Atlantic, were merely extending a practice which had been continuous in the Mediterranean since the remotest antiquity. And in all epochs men of one creed,
class, race or state have tended to despise, hate and fear men of alien identities. Few societies, furthermore, have been more parochial, self-satisfied, greedy and cruel than Europe in the age of the discoveries. So the fate of the Africans was as certain and unpleasant as that of the Red Indians with whom it was linked. They were to be enslaved, put to menial tasks and despised, as the masters have always despised the mastered. As time went on the neat reasoning that the African was enslaved because he was inferior, and was inferior because he was a slave, came to be supported by other, equally mischievous, if not always mutually consistent, syllogisms. Slavery was a punishment for the Fall of Man and therefore part of the natural order, not to be tampered with. The slave-trade conferred a benefit on the African, since it removed him from the sin and heathenism of the Dark Continent. The same African was a savage who could not be Christianized, and because he was not a Christian had no rights. Being black, heathen and enslaved the African was different, and therefore wrong, for to be European, and especially English, was to be right; to be heathen and enslaved was clearly to be inferior to a free Christian; since all Africans were black, heathen and enslaved perhaps their colour was inferior too. Indeed it quite clearly was, because black was the colour of night, of evil, of the curse of Ham (imposed on him for looking at his father Noah drunk and naked);
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and it was well known that black men preferred white women to their own, just as apes (it was alleged) preferred black women to mates of their own species.
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Possibly the black man was not human at all, but a lesser creature, a link in the Great Chain of Being between humanity and the apes. After all, he lived, and was first encountered by the European, in the same part of the world as the chimpanzee (known at that time as the orang-outang)
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… an immense farrago of evil nonsense slowly multiplied as men, otherwise of good conscience, found that they had to justify the continuing wrong they were inflicting on their fellow-men; and fear of rebellion or other retribution, fear inspired by guilt and the occasional violent expression of black resentment, made hatred inevitable and increased the will to justify the root of all evil. The result was the deeply entrenched, pathological enmity between the races which is the ugliest and oldest problem of American society; an enmity to which the light of Virginia, Mr Jefferson, gave revealing expression in those parts of his book on his native land,
Notes on Virginia
, where he expatiated at length on the ugliness of Africans. It
makes one look with a sceptical eye on his rhetoric, his architecture and the wooden plough he invented, and prefer, to his rustic paradise, cities such as Boston and Philadelphia where hope for the future was really being born.

Rural America, the ideal to which the Virginians were religiously committed, was never, even in the eighteenth century, the thing of absolute joy that they depicted. Social mobility – the means of rising from one class to another – was far greater in colonial America than in Europe, but it was greater in the towns than in the country. In some areas there was substantial social and political equality between the farmers, but these were the poorer regions. The richer areas showed sharp and rigid class divisions. But (a big but) geographical mobility – the chance to move west to virgin land and start a new, more prosperous career – offered hope to agrarian Americans on the make. The future lay that way for many. Before the Peace of Paris the French began to lay out a town where the rivers Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois meet; though it was to be under Spanish sovereignty for the next forty years, St Louis from its beginning attracted English-speaking traders and settlers. To the north-east, at the Forks of the Ohio, after the defeat of Pontiac, another wilderness town, Pittsburgh, began to grow up on the site of former Fort Pitt (or Duquesne). This westward movement soon created problems of the highest policy for the imperial government.

Meanwhile the great planters of Virginia were falling deeper and deeper into debt to London and Scottish merchants: the world price of tobacco was collapsing and the soil of Virginia was becoming exhausted. Planters in South Carolina, while more prosperous, lived for the few months in the year when they could flee from the dangers of yellow fever and slave rebellion on their rice and indigo plantations to Charles Town or, better still, to the cool breezes of Newport, Rhode Island, just then beginning its long career as the rich man’s playground.

The back-country, from Georgia to Maine, struggled against Indians, agrarian inefficiency, indebtedness and remoteness, already displaying a provincialism and a hatred for more prosperous Easterners (‘city slickers’) which were to scar American society until well into the twentieth century. Even Dr Franklin, who in 1764 nobly defended the rights of some Indians against a mob of rural lynchers (‘the Paxton Boys’), succumbed sufficiently to bucolic prejudice to worry about the incoming tide of Germans as well as that of Africans, fearing that the English settlers and their culture would be lost, and persuading himself that Swedes and Finns were darker than, and therefore inferior to, the English.

Almost every province had territorial claims that were unrealistic but not to be relinquished,
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and hence quarrelled with its neighbours over boundaries. The war between debtor and creditor interests which was to
figure for so long in American history was beginning, and taking its standard form of a dispute about paper money. Maryland, driven by economic necessity, had imported 20,000 transported convicts, as indentured servants, to the dismay of adjacent colonies.
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A sense of common interest, if not of common nationhood, was slowly, almost surreptitiously growing, but even in the face of the greatest emergency the colonies had yet known, the war with France, was not strong enough to sustain Franklin’s 1754 Albany Plan for colonial union. The peace, it was hoped, would bring renewed prosperity with it, as war had brought vigour and self-confidence; but everywhere there were discontents and grievances which very little would enflame. Rapid growth had made the colonies strong, and therefore potentially dangerous. They were not the sleeping dogs of Sir Robert Walpole’s favourite phrase: they were sleeping dragons.

That our subjects in the American colonies are children of the state and to be treated as such no one denies; but it can’t reasonably be admitted that the mother country should impoverish herself to enrich the children, nor that Great Britain should weaken herself to strengthen America.

Charles Davenant, 1698

If the Colonies do not now unite, and use their most vigorous endeavours in all proper ways, to avert this impending blow, they may for the future, bid farewell to freedom and liberty, burn their charters, and make the best of thraldom and slavery. For if we can have our interests and estates taken away, and disposed of without our consent, or having any voice therein, and by those whose interest as well as inclination it may be to shift the burden off from themselves under pretence of protecting and defending America, why may they not as well endeavour to raise millions upon us to defray the expenses of the last, or any future war?

Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut, 1764

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

Edmund Burke, 1775

War, next only to technology, is the most certain solvent of modern society. Reforms miscarry, revolutions are prevented or perverted; war is always with us and seldom or never fails to bring sweeping change. So it was with the Seven Years War.

Its immediate work was striking enough: the expulsion of the French from India and North America, the confirmation of Prussia’s expansion in Europe, the raising-up of British power, the casting-down of the ancient rival dynasties of Habsburg and Bourbon, the appearance of Russia as a principal factor in the balance of power. The war left behind it, like all wars, a set of new alignments for the next round: France and Spain clung together
in hope of a common revenge on Britain and, more ominous for the islanders, Frederick of Prussia, needing them no more, turned to collaboration with the Tsarina Catherine in the partition of Poland. Britain found herself without an ally on the continent.