The American Revolution: A History (3 page)

Thus the end of the Seven Years’ War did not end violence on the frontier. From the devastating Cherokee War of 1759–61 in South Carolina to the assault on the Shawnees in 1774 by Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, British officials repeatedly had to use royal troops to put down Indian revolts. The biggest Indian rebellion of the period occurred in 1763 following the British takeover of the former French forts in the West. In just a few weeks Indians from several tribes that had joined together under the leadership of an Ottawa chief named Pontiac surprised and destroyed all but three of the British posts west of the Appalachians. Before they were pushed back by British troops, the angry warriors had penetrated eastward into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and had killed more than 2,000 colonists. It is no wonder that many royal authorities in the 1760s concluded that only the presence of regular troops of the British army could maintain peace in the American borderlands of the empire.

The rapid growth and spread of people in the mid eighteenth century affected more than white-Indian relations on the frontier. Thousands of migrants flowed into the backcountry, beyond the reach of the eastern colonial governments. These backcountry settlers were so distant from legal authority that sometimes vigilante groups had to impose order. In the 1760s backcountry people in South Carolina organized vigilante “Regulators” to put down roving gangs of thieves, but extralegal posses of this kind often turned into raiders themselves. Sometimes frontiersmen in these trans-Appalachian areas of the West came together to form compacts of government for their raw societies, which often consisted of little more than “stations”—primitive stockaded forts surrounded by huts.

Everywhere in the backcountry the sudden influx of people weakened the legitimacy of existing authority. In the rapidly growing interiors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, settlers in the 1760s rose in arms against what they believed was exploitation by remote eastern governments. In western Pennsylvania, Scotch-Irish settlers led by the Paxton Boys rebelled against the Quaker-dominated, pacifist-minded Pennsylvania assembly, in which they were grossly underrepresented. In 1763–64 they killed Indians who were under the government’s protection and then marched on Philadelphia. The rebels turned back only after mediation by Benjamin Franklin and the promise of a greater voice in the eastern-controlled colonial assembly. In North Carolina not only was the backcountry underrepresented in the provincial legislature, but the local county courts were under the corrupt management of carpetbagging officials and lawyers from the eastern part of the colony. In 1767 a group of western vigilantes, assuming the familiar title Regulators, erupted in violence. They took over the county courts and petitioned the North Carolina government for greater representation, lower taxes, and local control of their affairs. Two thousand of these Regulators were dispersed by the North Carolina governor and his force of eastern militia at the so-called battle of Alamance in 1771. But royal officials could not so easily dispel the deeply rooted fears among many Americans of the dangers of unfair representation and distant political power. Indeed these westerners were only voicing toward their own colonial governments the same attitudes that Americans in general had about British power.

ECONOMIC EXPANSION

All these consequences flowing from the increased numbers of people in North America were bound to raise Britain’s interest in its colonies. But population pressures were not all that were reshaping British attitudes toward the colonies and transforming American society. Equally important was the remarkable expansion of the Anglo-American economy taking place in the middle years of the eighteenth century.

By 1750 in Britain the immediate origins of what would soon become the industrial revolution were already visible. British imports, exports, and industrial production of various sorts—all the major indicators of economic growth—were rapidly rising. Americans were deeply involved in this sudden British economic expansion, and by 1760 they were prospering as never before.

In the years after 1745, colonial trade with Great Britain grew dramatically and became an increasingly important segment of the English and Scottish economies. Nearly half of all English shipping was engaged in American commerce. The North American mainland was absorbing 25 percent of English exports, and Scottish commercial involvement with the colonies was growing even more rapidly. From 1747 to 1765 the value of colonial exports to Britain doubled from about £700,000 to £1.5 million, while the value of colonial imports from Britain rose even faster, from about £900,000 to more than £2 million. For the first time in the eighteenth century, Britain’s own production of foodstuffs could not meet the needs of its suddenly rising population. By 1760, Britain was importing more grain than it exported. This increasing demand for foodstuffs—not only in Great Britain, but in southern Europe and the West Indies as well—meant soaring prices for American exports. Between the 1740s and the 1760s, the price of American produce exported to the Caribbean increased by huge percentages. Seeing the greater demand and rising prices for American exports, more and more ordinary farmers began to produce foodstuffs and other goods for distant markets. By the 1760s remote trading centers in the backcountry such as Staunton, Virginia, and Salisbury, North Carolina, were shipping large quantities of tobacco and grain eastward to the sea along networks of roads and towns. Port cities like Baltimore, Norfolk, and Alexandria grew up almost overnight to handle this swelling traffic.

Soaring prices for agricultural exports meant rising standards of living for more and more Americans. It was not just the great planters of the South and the big merchants of the cities who were getting richer. Now ordinary Americans were also buying luxury items that traditionally had been purchased only by wealthy gentry—items that were increasingly called conveniences and that ranged from Irish linen and lace to matched sets of Wedgwood dishes. Benjamin Franklin tells us in his autobiography that his wife Deborah surprised him one morning with some new replacements for his pewter spoon and earthen bowl. By purchasing these items simply because “she thought her Husband deserved a Silver Spoon & China Bowl as well as any of his Neighbours,” she was raising her family’s status and standard of living. At the same time, she was contributing to what historians have come to call an eighteenth-century “consumer revolution.”

Although nineteen out of twenty Americans were still engaged in agriculture, the rising levels of taste and consumption drew more colonists into manufacturing—at first, mostly the production of crude textiles and shoes. Transportation and communications rapidly improved as roads were built and regular schedules were established for stagecoaches and packet boats. In the 1750s the Post Office, under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin, the colonial deputy postmaster general, instituted weekly mails between Philadelphia and Boston and cut delivery time in half, from six to three weeks. The growing population, better roads, more reliable information about markets, and the greater variety of towns all encouraged domestic manufacturing for regional and intercolonial markets. By 1768 colonial manufacturers were supplying Pennsylvania with eight thousand pairs of shoes a year. Areas of eastern Massachusetts were becoming more involved in manufacturing: in 1767 the town of Haverhill, with fewer than three hundred residents, had forty-four workshops and nineteen mills. By this date many colonial artisans and would-be manufacturers were more than eager to support associations to boycott rival English imports.

But most colonists still preferred British goods. From the late 1740s on, Americans were importing from Britain about £500,000 worth of goods more than they were exporting to the mother country, and thus they continued to be troubled by a trade deficit with Britain. Part of this deficit in the colonists’ balance of payments with Britain was made up by the profits of shipping, by British wartime expenditures in America, and by increased sales to Europe and the West Indies. But a large part was also made up by the extension to the colonists of large amounts of English and Scottish credit. By 1760 colonial debts to Britain amounted to £2 million; by 1772 they had jumped to more than £4 million. After 1750 a growing proportion of this debt was owed by colonists who earlier had been excluded from direct dealings with British merchants. More and more small tobacco farmers in the Chesapeake gained immediate access to British credit and markets through the spread of Scottish “factors” (storekeepers) in the backcountry of Virginia and Maryland. By 1760 it was not unusual for as many as 150 petty traders in a single port to be doing business with a London merchant company.

These demographic and economic forces undermined the customary paternalistic structure of colonial society. The ties of kinship and patronage that traditionally held people together, which had never been strong in America to begin with, were now further weakened. Even in Virginia, one of the most stable of the colonies, the leading aristocratic plantation owners found their authority challenged by small farmers who were no longer as personally dependent on them for credit and markets. These small farmers now forged more impersonal connections with the new Scottish factors and became more much independent than they had been before. They expressed this independence by becoming more involved in politics and by promoting religious dissent. During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, not only did the number of contested elections to the Virginia House of Burgesses increase markedly, but also ordinary people in Virginia began leaving the established Church of England in growing numbers. They formed new evangelical religious communities that rejected the high style and luxury of the dominant Anglican gentry. Within a few years succeeding waves of New Light Presbyterians, Separate Baptists, and finally Methodists swept up new converts from among the common farmers of the Chesapeake region. Between 1769 and 1774 the number of Baptist churches in Virginia increased from seven to fifty-four.

The Virginia gentry blamed the growth of religious dissent on the long-claimed incompetence of the Anglican ministers. In turn the ministers accused the lay vestries, which were composed of Anglican gentry, of not supporting them. Amid these mutual accusations the Virginia House of Burgesses passed acts in 1755 and 1758 that fixed at twopence a pound the standard value of tobacco used to meet debts and public obligations. Since tobacco prices were rising rapidly, these so-called Two-Penny Acts penalized creditors and those public officials (including ministers) who were used to being paid in tobacco. British merchants and the ministers of Virginia’s established Anglican Church protested and were able to get the king’s Privy Council in England to disallow the Burgesses’ 1758 act. In 1763 a rising young lawyer, Patrick Henry, first made his reputation as a powerful popular orator in a court battle over one of the Virginia ministers’ legal suits for the recovery of wages lost by the now illegal Two-Penny Act. In his defense of the Virginia planters against this “Parson’s Cause,” Henry went so far as to claim that, because the king had vetoed the act, he “from being the father of his people [has] degenerated into a Tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects’ obedience.” That Henry could be celebrated for such histrionic (and seditious) remarks was a measure of how tenuous and brittle traditional relationships had become. Everywhere in the colonies, nerves were on edge and men were quick to blame all authority, including that of the king three thousand miles away, for the rapidly changing circumstances of their lives.

It is doubtful whether anyone anywhere in the mid eighteenth century knew how to control the powerful social and economic forces at work in the Anglo-American world. Certainly the flimsy administrative arrangement that governed the British Empire seemed scarcely capable of managing this incredibly dynamic world. No doubt by mid-century many British officials had come to realize that some sort of overhaul of this increasingly important empire was needed. But few understood the explosive energy and the sensitive nature of the people they were tampering with. The British Empire, Benjamin Franklin warned, was like a fragile Chinese vase that required delicate handling indeed.

REFORM OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

After 1748 various imperial reforms were in the air. The eye-opening experience of fighting the Seven Years’ War amid the colonists’ evasion and corruption of the navigation laws had provoked William Pitt and other royal officials into vigorous, though piecemeal, reforms of the imperial system. But these beginnings might have been suppressed, as others earlier had been, if it had not been for the enormous problems that were created by the Peace of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763.

The most immediate of these problems was the reorganization of the territory that had been acquired from France and Spain. New governments had to be organized, the Indian trade had to be regulated, land claims had to be sorted out, and something had to be done to keep the conflicts between land-hungry white settlers and angry Native Americans from exploding into open warfare.

Even more disturbing was the huge expense confronting the British government. By 1763 the war debt totaled £137 million; its annual interest alone was £5 million, a huge figure when compared with an ordinary yearly British peacetime budget of only £8 million. There was, moreover, little prospect of military costs declining. Since the new territories were virtually uninhabited by Englishmen, the government could not rely on its traditional system of local defense and police to preserve order. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief in North America, estimated that he would need 10,000 troops to keep the peace with the French and Indians and to deal with squatters, smugglers, and bandits. Thus at the outset of the 1760s the British government made a crucial decision that no subsequent administration ever abandoned—the decision to maintain a standing army in America. This peacetime army was more than double the size of the army that had existed in the colonies before the Seven Years’ War, and the costs of maintaining it quickly climbed to well over £300,000 a year.