Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (25 page)

Howe’s failure to destroy Washington’s army in Long Island and on the Delaware River in the autumn of 1776, when he seemed able to do so; Burgoyne’s failure to lure the American forces into an ambush that would have reversed the outcome of the subsequent Battle of Saratoga; the escape of the American army from its British pursuers after the Battle of Cowpens; Washington’s decision to strike south in late 1781 rather than adhere to his intended attack on New York, a decision which led to Yorktown: the military history of the Revolutionary War is thick with pivotal incidents which, decided otherwise, might have had major effects on the final result.

The details of military conflict have a wider significance. Had the course of the war been different, it has been suggested, the shape of the America that emerged from the fighting might have been different also. Had British arms been more successful, and been overcome only by a more systematic American response, ‘The consequence might have been a very different American public culture, one that stressed the national state more than the individual, obligations more than rights.’
¹⁰⁰
Yet military conflict is as uncertain in prospect as the result seems triumphantly assured in retrospect. Contemporary American historians of the Revolution knew this, for they were close to and often confronted by the awkward fact that the outcomes of battles had hinged on minor events. They uneasily reflected, as did William Gordon: ‘On incidents of this kind may depend the rise and fall of mighty kingdoms, and the far distant future transfer of power, glory, and riches, of arts and sciences, from Europe to America.’
¹⁰¹
Gordon’s inconclusive discussion of such incidents, suggests a modern analyst, marks a point at which historians broke with their Puritan, predestinarian past by attempting to give some historical rigour to the force of contingency and to equip their new republic with a serious, professional account of its origins; but they emancipated themselves only in part. They

Providence survived only for ‘ideological and aesthetic purposes’.
¹⁰²
Not God but American manifest destiny became the final cause.

It might be suggested that the American Revolution thus achieved an important stage in the secularisation of historical explanations. Henceforth, trivial events (inexplicable contingencies) and grand counterfactuals (providential destinies) were no longer united within a providential order, and so were potentially at odds with each other. Yet this too may have been an unintended outcome, if Lester Cohen’s account of early patriot historians of the Revolution is correct: ‘by conflating providence and chance, by destroying the traditional use of providence as a mode of explanation, and by using chance independently of providence’, those historians meant to achieve the same ends as Hume and Gibbon: ‘to reinfuse history with a sense of contingency, and to present causation as a complex problem’.
¹⁰³
They succeeded only, however, in giving America’s history a new, though secular, purposiveness.

These historians ‘wanted it both ways. On the one hand, they aimed to write impartial history, dedicated to truth and the service of humanity and pure in language and style; while on the other, they meant to develop a distinctively
American
history, intended to justify the Revolution and to inculcate the principles of republicanism in future generations of Americans.’ Moreover, they ‘saw no contradiction between their efforts to be objective and their insisting upon the principles and values of the Revolution’,
¹⁰⁴
a problem which, it might be suggested, has persisted in some quarters. The counterfactual was not to be entertained in the new American republic, any more than it had been in the Puritan phase of colonial history. Puritan theology, the revolutionaries’ heritage, had regarded the future as unknown only to man: the future had, however, already been predetermined from the Creation by God, and man lacked the power to change it by acts of free will. By contrast, the new ‘zealous rhetoric’ of the revolutionaries manifested ’the sense of urgency, anxiety and challenge presented by an indeterminate future and by the feeling that people are responsible for the future’s shape’.
¹⁰⁵
They were to be free to shape it, but in only one way.

The Revolutionary historians, then, attempted to devise a more sophisticated, more professionally historical version of their nation’s founding. They did so not least by qualifying Puritan predestinarianism with a new sense of the force of chance. But they were unable to proceed more than a part of the way towards this professionalism, because the logic of contingency had to be made subservient to a single, predetermined end, the rightness and inevitability of an independent United States. The alternative counterfactual, which pointed to another and equally feasible scenario for the development of a British North America, was implicitly excluded from the outset. So the real dynamic of history, the interplay between counterfactuals and contingencies, was never grasped. Instead, the Revolutionary historians used a residual notion of providence as a way of hinting at their purposive understanding of American destiny, and were led to use contingency only as a device to secularise providence rather than as a means of eliminating teleology. In this way were the broad outlines of the problem established at an early date.

It was not only the white colonists whose futures were at stake, however. If a British America might have taken a more libertarian, less populist direction, it is worth considering the implications of such a polity for the two groups which were to be so massively disadvantaged in the new republic: Native Americans and African-American slaves.

Before the Seven Years’ War, each colony had determined its own policy toward the Native Americans. These policies had enjoyed little success in alleviating the continual friction, sometimes flaring into savage conflict, which resulted as the settlers dispossessed the natives. Assimilation largely failed: Native Americans showed a marked unwillingness to accept enslavement or to surrender a nomadic for a settled way of life, and pastoral for arable farming. Settlers, especially when they were Calvinist predestinarians, showed little of the practical desire to convert the natives to Christianity that the Anglican discoverers of the new world in the early seventeenth century had promised. Britain had, however, a major rival on the North American continent. French relations with the Indians were far better: the Catholic drive to convert the natives implied far more respect than could be inferred from New England Puritanism; the French reliance on the fur trade similarly argued for a certain reciprocity, where English-speaking settlers aimed at settlement and expropriation.

It was the need to compete with France for the favour of Indian tribes in wartime, especially the Seven Years’ War, that induced the government in London to involve itself in Indian policy. So pressing was this need, as Anglo-French conflicts on the American frontier escalated into a major international conflict, that London was willing not only to regulate Anglo-Indian trade but to address the major problem: land. Three times during the war the metropolitan government signed treaties with Indians (Easton, 1758; Lancaster, 1760; Detroit, 1761) which committed the unwilling white colonists to respect the line of the Appalachian mountains as the limit of settlement: these treaties remained in force after the war was over, and Indian policy was quickly expressed in the royal proclamation of 7 October 1763. From Georgia to Quebec, the same principle now applied: land west of the Appalachians was reserved for Indians, and permission of the imperial government was required before purchase or settlement. Licences were made necessary for traders.
De facto
authority in this area rested with the British commander-in-chief in North America, working through two Indian superintendents. Clearly, the metropolitan authorities were establishing a structure intended to implement a comprehensive Indian policy. It was not proposed to halt westward expansion permanently but to regulate it, in the wake of controlled imperial purchases of Indian territory.

A major Indian rebellion in 1763, Pontiac’s uprising, and the haphazard colonial response to it, made metropolitan control of Indian policy more essential, as the imperial government saw it, and a standing army more necessary to police the frontier. It was the cost of these forces that gave additional urgency to metropolitan attempts to raise revenue from the colonists. Whatever the difficulties this caused, the final objective - to free both colonists and Indians from the threat of periodic massacre - was intelligible enough. A British army would have been needed in North America anyway, to secure the older British colonies against the strategic threat posed by newly acquired Canada and Florida, and this in itself would have required a colonial revenue: for the imperial government to have ignored the Indian problem would not have solved the constitutional problems raised by imperial taxation.
¹⁰⁶
But a British America might have been one in which the westward migration of peoples was regulated and humanised, freed in part from the stains of massacre and exploitation which were later to characterise it.

Black slaves might equally have enjoyed a radically different lot in a continuing British America. White colonists interpreted as treachery the decision of the Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in November 1775, to offer emancipation to slaves who rallied to the British cause,
¹⁰⁷
but aside from pressing military needs this episode may also have reflected the faster and further evolution in Britain of opinion on the question of chattel slavery. Similarly, where many groups in the colonies remained rabidly anti-Catholic in a way which recalled seventeenth-century traumas, British opinion was already moving towards a lifting of Catholic disabilities. In 1772 Lord Mansfield’s judgement in
Somersett’s case
established that the common law at once dissolved the bonds of slavery for blacks on English soil: with a British America loudly claiming the rights of Englishmen, it would only have been a matter of time before the same principle was communicated to the colonies. How long would it have taken? Within the empire, a supreme political authority in the metropolis, combined with the power of the Royal Navy, was able to end the slave trade following legislation of 1806-11 and proceed to the emancipation of slaves in British possessions overseas after legislation of 1833; in America, political realities compelled the deletion of Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery in his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence. Black colonists who fought for the crown during the Revolutionary War (as many did) fought with some reason.
¹⁰⁸
Historians have debated whether the American war of the 1860s was essentially about slavery, or essentially about the rights of the subordinate legislatures to resist Sir William Blackstone’s doctrine of the indivisibility and absoluteness of sovereignty by secession. In either case, the events of the 1860s can be analysed as the second American Civil War, a reversion to the problems left unresolved in the first. Had the events of the 1770s developed differently, therefore, it is possible that avenues of negotiation and compromise would have developed which might have skirted the second great catastrophe to afflict the North American continent.

Not only the British and their former colonists but continental European observers also entertained counterfactual reflections on the Revolution’s result. The French political economist Turgot, in a memorandum written in April 1776, expected an independent America to emerge from the conflict; but, should the outcome of the war be the opposite, the scale of British military resources committed to the colonies would inevitably lead to a British conquest of the whole continent from Newfoundland to Panama, expelling the French from Louisiana and the Spaniards from Mexico.
¹⁰⁹
A transatlantic world of peace and trade would have promoted the economic development and population growth of Britain’s American colonies: without the war of 1776-83, which devastated the colonial economy and delayed its development by decades, the wealth and power of a libertarian North Atlantic polity might have promoted meliorist reform in France rather than
philosophe
-inspired revolution. The point is so obvious that it rarely needs to be stressed: had the American Revolution not taken the form it did in 1776-83, it is highly unlikely that the French state would have staggered vainly beneath a fatal fiscal burden, and collapsed in ruin in 1788-9.

Such a counterfactual is so large, and so far removed from the actual outcome, that it loses touch with historical enquiry. Analysts of the counterfactual must beware of that easy escape which is offered by the argument that, but for some initial mistake, some tragic error, all would have been well, and mankind released from avoidable conflicts into a golden age of peaceful progress. From the perspective of 1914 or 1939, British observers might easily look back regretfully on the great opportunity missed, the opportunity to create a peaceful and prosperous North Atlantic Anglophone polity, united in its commitment to libertarian and commercial values. The Whig-Liberal tradition of English historiography could make such a course seem plausible by ascribing the American Revolution to easily avoidable errors of British policy, especially the personal failings of George III. This explanation has become increasingly unlikely, however. Even if conflict had been avoided in the 1770s, as it well might, this would not have guaranteed future tranquillity
sine die
.