Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (21 page)

Even experienced colonial administrators might share this perspective. In 1764, Thomas Pownall, who had been Governor of Massachusetts from 1757 to 1759, looked to the strengthening of the hold of the metropolis on a mercantilist empire by reinforcing the tie between Whitehall and each colony individually, while carefully avoiding any possibility of a union of colonies. According to Pownall, developing commercial relations made a transatlantic breakdown impossible:

In the second edition of this work, published in 1765 after the colonial outcry against the Stamp Act, Pownall left this passage unchanged and merely prefaced his tract with a Dedication to George Grenville which explained how the recent tumults had been produced by ‘demagogues’:

These expectations explain men’s astonishment at the Revolution. The Virginia Congressman Edmund Randolph wrote later of the famous protest of Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765 against the Stamp Act:

Joseph Galloway, Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly between 1766 and 1775, argued from the perspective of 1779 that during the Seven Years’ War ‘there was no part of his Majesty’s dominions contained a greater proportion of faithful subjects than the Thirteen Colonies.... The idea of disloyalty, at this time, scarcely existed in America; or, if it did, it was never expressed with impunity.’

This only created the paradox: how could such deep-rooted attachment be so suddenly reversed?

Galloway’s solution to the paradox was a radical one: the colonists in general were not disaffected, as some zealots for republicanism had claimed, and might be won back to their allegiance. It was an argument which still challenges the received explanation of the Revolution as the culmination of long-prepared American nationalism.

Nor was Galloway alone. The Boston judge Peter Oliver argued that the Revolution was a
‘singular’
phenomenon: ‘For, by adverting to the historick Page, we shall find no Revolt of Colonies, whether under the
Roman
or any other State, but what originated from severe Oppressions.’ But America had been ‘nursed, in its Infancy, with the most tender Care & Attention ... indulged with every Gratification ... repeatedly saved from impending Destruction’; this was ‘an unnatural Rebellion’, instigated by a small minority of the colonists only, a ‘few abandoned Demagogues’.
³⁴
The Earl of Dartmouth’s under-secretary for the colonies, Ambrose Serle, observing events in New York, reacted in the same way to news of the constitutions of New Jersey and Virginia: ‘An Influenza more wonderful, and at the same time more general than that of the Witchcraft in the Province of Massachuset’s Bay in the last Century! The Annals of no Country can produce an Instance of so virulent a Rebellion, of such implacable madness and Fury, originating from such trivial Causes, as those alledged by these unhappy People.’
³⁵
‘Will not posterity be amazed,’ wrote the Massachusetts lawyer and politician Daniel Leonard, ‘when they are told that the present distraction took its rise from the parliament’s taking off a shilling duty on a pound of tea, and imposing three pence, and call it a more unaccountable phrenzy, and more disgraceful to the annals of America, than that of the witchcraft?’
³⁶
Only after their initial incomprehension at the justifications of the patriots did such men come to explain the Revolution as a volcano, erupting in response to enormous internal pressures.

The tragic quality of the Revolution of 1688 lies in the trope of Boccaccio’s
De Casibus Virorum Illustrium
: ‘the fall of great men’; the malign turn of fortune’s wheel that reduces the most noble and splendid to the most base, and does so from trivial causes. It is, in retrospect, the tragedy of contingency. The same is true, it might be argued, of 1776; yet the need retrospectively to integrate the events of the mid-1770s into the founding myth of a great nation has created a different impression. The tragic quality of 1776 now seems to lie in the inexorable logic of an approaching doom, a chain of events, unfolding to catastrophe, triggered not by a tragic error but by the pursuit of high ideals and good intentions. The historian is entitled to doubt whether such chains of causation were as inevitable at the time as they were later made to seem. And to abolish inevitability is to open up counterfactuals.

Until recently, historians’ accounts of the causes of the Revolution of 1776 tended to become a familiar - and teleological - litany of the stages of British policy and colonial responses to it, both expressed in a secular constitutional idiom: the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Tea Party, the ‘Intolerable Acts’.
³⁷
The decision to declare independence made it necessary to argue that the causes of the Revolution were external, so that the ‘ostensible causes’ of the conflict were the true ones: these innovations in British policy alone were sufficient to explain the colonial reaction to them.
³⁸
Such a pattern of explanation was implicitly counterfactual, but inadequately so: it had to suggest (without conviction) that slight changes in colonial policy at Westminster and Whitehall would have left the empire intact. Although metropolitan policy should indeed be questioned in this way, presenting the problem in these terms alone obscured the options plausibly available for colonial Americans; in particular, it systematically removed their major counterfactual, the obvious and central path of peaceful colonial development within the empire in the direction of greater political and less cultural autonomy.

In deference to national cultural imperatives, it has been an assumption shared with remarkable unanimity by recent American historians of the American Revolution that the causes of that event were external to the colonies.
³⁹
Two scholarly and powerful versions of that thesis are currently prevalent, though neither should be accepted as it stands. One is owed to Bernard Bailyn, and was devised in the 1960s. In this model, colonists in the early part of the eighteenth century adopted from England a political rhetoric derived from the ‘Commonwealthmen’, a rhetoric which identified political virtue in landed independence, representative institutions, religious scepticism, gentry dominance and a militia, and saw political corruption in standing armies, placemen, arbitrary taxation, priestcraft and assertive kingship. In the early 1760s, colonists thought they saw these evils in British policy. Given the nature of British politics and innovations in colonial policy, argued Bailyn, it was rational for them so to think.
⁴⁰

The second variant of that ‘externalist’ interpretation has much older origins, but its most modern version was formulated by Jack P. Greene. It depicts the emergence of a consensual, tacitly accepted constitutional structure for relations between colonies and metropolis by the early eighteenth century. That structure allegedly ensured
de facto
autonomy to each colonial assembly, and produced a quasi-federal system of colonial self-rule. According to this thesis, it was the colonists’ consensual understanding of already extensive American autonomy that was challenged by British policy in the 1760s and, with the British persisting in their infringements, armed resistance was the final and natural response.
⁴¹

Without substantiating the point, both Bailyn and Greene contended that the colonial tie with Britain could have survived unchallenged for a long period, but for metropolitan innovations.
⁴²
Colonial demands, they argued, could all have been accommodated within the empire had the British government acted differently. If so, it made sense for many historians to frame counterfactuals in British politics rather than in American politics:

The two distinguished authors of that passage, one British, one American, in a work published in 1976, strikingly omitted a similar list of counterfactuals on the colonial side. Yet although these counterfactual insights into metropolitan politics have not been refuted, attention has increasingly shifted to the social and denominational conflicts, the ideological debates in law and religion, that explain the colonies’ swift conversion from loyalism to disaffection.

Recent scholarship has steadily converted to the view that whatever the vicissitudes of British ministerial politics between 1765 and 1775, and whichever individuals were in office, the range of options available within British colonial policy was unlikely by itself to have made a major difference to the outcome. The best-informed colonial administrators of the 1750s adopted diametrically opposite views on whether the colonies should be subdued by force or won by kindness; yet even such contrasting figures as Henry Ellis, a hawk who favoured force, and Thomas Pownall, reputedly a dove, had much in common in asserting metropolitan authority. Pownall in 1764 looked to strengthen the hold of the metropolis over a mercantilist empire through strengthening the tie between Whitehall and each individual colony while carefully avoiding any possibility of a union of colonies. Nevertheless, argued John Shy, Pownall’s supposedly pacific policy in fact anticipated ‘The Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the extension of vice-admiralty jurisdiction, the creation of West Indian free ports and a Secretary of State for the Colonies, even threats to the Rhode Island charter, the alteration of the Massachusetts Council, and adamant opposition to inter-colonial congresses’.

It follows that ‘if Thomas Pownall and Henry Ellis are taken to represent the limits of what was conceivable in American policy between 1763 and 1775, then the range of historical possibilities was very narrow indeed’. By contrast,