To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  After the war, commentators began to speak of crime as a “contagion,” and of criminals as part of a degenerate “criminal class.” According to Patrick Colquhoun, a Scottish merchant, opponent of the American Revolution, and advocate of policing reforms, Britain was now in a “state of criminal warfare,” with criminals as “enemies of the state.” Years of riots, invasion scares, treasonous plots, and radical ideology had transformed crime from a local domestic concern into a national political issue that threatened the peace, prosperity, and stability of Britain itself. War and radical politics had turned the common criminal into a traitor. New fears, new conceptions of crime and criminality required new approaches to law and order that reflected the newly politicized nature of the problem. In the 1780s and 1790s, a variety of proposals were advanced all designed to take law, justice, and punishment out of the hands of a people who could no longer be trusted.

  As we have seen, the period surrounding the American War saw the advent of a new carceral regime. The more uniform, more rigorous punishment represented by prisons reflected the shifting view of criminality of the post-war period, but it also began to strip away the role of the public. Prisons were intentionally anti-discretionary, replacing human considerations of mercy and terror with government-mandated standardization. This may have seemed more logical to enlightened reformers, but it was also a means of taking more judicial decision-making out of the hands of a now suspect people. Prisons also removed other aspects of popular participation in criminal justice by replacing public corporal punishments with private, state-controlled incarceration. In a similar institutionalization of punishment, after 1783 the execution of condemned criminals was moved from its traditional site at Tyburn to outside Newgate Prison. After the dreadful riots of the war years, the authorities no longer trusted the crowds that had habitually gathered at Tyburn to witness executions. Step by step, Britain’s public, participatory justice system was being dismantled in the name of centralization and state control.

  Fears of disorder and disloyalty, and new conceptions of crime and criminality also led to radical shifts in views of policing. Historically, British criminal justice had relied on locally elected or selected part-time amateurs to enforce the law. Though there had been some small-scale innovations in formal policing, for most of the eighteenth century Britons had looked at French innovations in government-controlled professional policing with deep skepticism. A police force, many believed, would be detrimental to British liberty and to traditions of local self-government, the tool of tyrannical state power. Few had forgotten how Oliver Cromwell had used his New Model Army as an “evangelical constabulary” to suppress dissent and shut down popular pastimes and public gatherings. Neither had Britons ignored the part the French police played in propping up the despotic power of their monarchs. A professional police force had thus long been anathema in Britain. The American crisis, however, led more and more Britons to embrace the idea of professional policing as a positive means of protecting property and keeping the disorderly mob in line. In the wake of the Gordon Riots, Horace Walpole had sensed the change in mood, fearing that Lord Gordon and his riots would be “the source of our being ruled by an army.” The army would prove a temporary expedient for quelling London’s wartime turmoil, but Walpole was right that the post-war world would witness a raft of legislation giving greater policing powers to the state.61

  The office of Home Secretary was created in 1782 to ensure domestic order and direct efforts to control crime and popular agitation. In 1783, the City of London ordered salaried city marshals and constables to make regular patrols in large numbers to ensure order. In 1785, Solicitor-General Sir Archibald Macdonald introduced the London Police Bill, which sought to establish police districts in Greater London, with oversight of the new system placed firmly in the hands of a centrally appointed commission answering to the Home Office. Not only would this bill concentrate policing power in the hands of the state, it also sought to expand preventative policing by authorizing officers to conduct searches, surveil suspects, and arrest and summarily convict suspected vagrants. The 1785 bill failed in the face of opposition from the City of London, but many of its provisions would be revived in future legislation in 1787, 1792, and 1798 that set the stage for the formation of modern, professional policing in Britain. Coming as it did on the heels of a period of profound crisis and disorder, most welcomed this authoritarian, centralizing turn. Others, like the Whig champion Charles James Fox, were less pleased, fearing “a new principle which overturned the tradition of magisterial detachment and threatened perverting the law to oppression.” Despite Fox’s fears, however, the American War would prove a watershed moment in which widespread opposition to professional policing was replaced for the first time with broad acceptance.62

  Fox had been one of the most vociferous opponents of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1777, but here too the precedent of expanded ministerial power had been set. The suspension of habeas corpus lapsed in 1783, but the emergency measures of wartime legislation would form the basis for future government attempts to quash internal dissent. When the threat of British radicalism reared its head under the looming cloud of the French Revolution in the 1790s, the government would look back to the tactics of the American War to stifle unrest. In 1793, acts targeting foreigners and requiring friendly societies to officially register were passed. In 1794–5 and 1798–1801, habeas corpus was once more suspended, and in 1795 rights of free speech, the press, and assembly were all heavily restricted. These measures were certainly a reaction to the perceived dangers of the French Revolution and its fellow-travelers in Britain, but they were also in many ways a result of the experiments made and the lessons learnt during the American crisis. The rebellion of Britain’s American subjects, the terror caused by John the Painter, Henri de la Motte, and the Gordon Riots, the fears of crime run rampant, all convinced many Britons that the further concentration of power in the hands of the government was necessary. The war for American liberty fundamentally shifted the mood in Britain to one in favor of greater government control. The people had proved they could not be trusted.

  The years 1797 and 1798 were anni mirabiles for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They had removed themselves from the breakneck pace of a Britain in the full swing of the Industrial Revolution, renting idyllic retreats in the Quantock Hills of Somerset and reaping the artistic benefits of rural seclusion. It was here, in these years, that Wordsworth and Coleridge would write some of their best-loved works, the joint effort Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s opium-inspired Kubla Khan. But if they thought that full immersion in the glories of their personal poetic Xanadu would spare them from the tribulations of the times they were sorely deluded. For even in this West Country idyll, eyes were watching and agents reporting the poets’ every action and every visitor. This was the reality in the world first spawned by the American Revolution.

  By 1797 the war with France that had begun in 1778 had been grinding on for over two decades, with a hiatus between the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the renewal of hostilities in 1793. Radicals in France had overthrown the monarchy in 1789 ushering in an age of terror and revolution on the continent. In a Britain terrified at the prospects of invasion from without and radical revolution within, perceived enemies of the state continued to abound. Innocuous-sounding groups like the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society, which advocated constitutional and parliamentary reform, were viewed by the government as sparks that might light the fires of revolt and were thus closely monitored. In 1792, 1793, and 1794 suspected radicals such as John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke were tried for treason. Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense, one of the most important rallying cries of revolution in America, had escaped official prosecution, was now indicted in absentia for treason alongside the British publishers of his Rights of Man. In a desperate attempt to forestall the radicalization of the nation, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger passed measures in 1795 that reinforced the tre
ason laws and limited public meetings to no more than fifty people.

  Inspired by radical politics, Coleridge had been corresponding with John Thelwall since 1796, and the redoubtable reformer had visited both poets at their Somerset retreat. In the paranoid atmosphere of the times, such connections were enough to draw the gaze of the government, and spies were placed to watch the activities of the budding Romantics. Though Coleridge and Wordsworth escaped official censure, the heightened fear of internal radicalism and revolutionary France would ensure that treason and terror plagued the dreams of governments and individuals until the final fall of Napoleon in 1815. These forty years of paranoia began with imperial civil war in 1775 and exploded with new force in the years after France joined the war in 1778. In the aftermath of the American Revolution radicalism and reform increasingly became associated with treason, terror, and violence, and as more and more of the British populace turned their backs on reform, new, more authoritarian policies were put in place to prevent the country from following America into the abyss. The lessons learned from the disorder of the American War thus ensured Britain avoided the revolutionary tide that swept across continental Europe in the 1780s and 1790s, but it did so at a cost. Countless men and women, from French spies, to American students to English poets had their lives fundamentally altered by these years of treason, terror, and paranoia.

  3

  REVOLUTION, REACTION, AND

  SECTARIANISM IN IRELAND

  The Gordon Riots, and the fears that helped produce them, were born of international events, and their impact would likewise stretch far beyond the bounds of London. Ignatius Sancho worried that the riots meant that “America seems to be quite lost or forgot amongst us; the fleet is but a secondary affair.” But if Britain was distracted by its own catastrophic self-immolation, the eerie glow of the burning metropolis cast a far different light on American soil. The rest of the world was certainly watching. George Washington welcomed the news of England’s “disturbances,” seeing in them the possibility of a strategic advantage in his contest with Britain. The riots, he confided to a friend, presented dramatic evidence that America’s “hour of deliverance was not far distant.” Alexander Hamilton agreed with his mentor’s assessment, writing to his fiancée Elizabeth Schuyler that “the affairs of England are in so bad a plight that . . . it will seem impossible for her to proceed in the war.”1 Britain seemed to be consuming itself, forced to marshal money and manpower to restrain its own subjects, resources that were sorely needed in North America. Perhaps the Gordon Riots would be the final straw that broke the empire’s back. Americans, however, were not the only ones to see the prospect of independence in the Gordon Riots.

  Though it was London that nearly consumed itself in an orgy of riot, fires, and repression, the original source of the problem, the root cause of the fear, the terror, and the rage, lay across the sea, in America, and in Ireland. Given the anxieties of wartime Britain, what possessed the government to attempt so desperate, so controversial a gambit as Catholic Relief at the height of a period of crisis? As Ignatius Sancho lamented from his vantage point in London, “the present time is rather comique. Ireland is almost in as true a state of rebellion as America. Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies—and at home admirals who do not chuse to fight. The British empire mouldering away in the west—annihilated in the north—Gibraltar going—and England fast asleep.” In the midst of this unhappy, this disordered, this “dark and critical time,” the Irish had taken up arms. For Britain, the war brought danger, but for the Irish, it brought leverage and opportunity.2

  That London’s vengeful crowds attacked Irish immigrants came as no surprise. The Irish had long been vilified, even dehumanized, as barbaric, uncivilized, and untrustworthy, a morally compromised criminal element, a festering sore in London’s slums. This attitude had become more prevalent in the eighteenth century as Irish immigrants poured into London in ever greater numbers. At the root of much of this bigotry was English fear and hatred of Irish Catholicism. Sure that the Irish would choose religion over political allegiance, many Britons feared that the Irish, at home and in England, would welcome or even aid an invasion by Catholic France and Spain. In 1780 the London mob, reflecting popular prejudices, thus lashed out at Irish immigrants as Catholic fifth columnists ready to betray Protestant England from within.

  In Ireland itself, however, there was genuine concern about the dangers posed by American privateer raids and a Franco-Spanish invasion, especially among the minority Protestant Ascendancy that dominated Irish politics. Contrary to its legal obligations, Britain, in constant need of soldiers for its American war, had drained Ireland of its fighting men. Ireland was thus left vulnerable to foreign attack. In response to this British neglect, Protestants around the country banded together in militia units to protect their island from foreign invasion. The Volunteer movement, as the militia companies came to be known, soon spread across Ireland, with as many as 60,000 under arms.

  But though the Volunteers had originally organized for the defense of their homes from foreign threat, their resolutions rapidly began to take on a more political, more radical tone. From repelling French invasion, the Volunteers began to talk of a new target, a new aim. They composed new resolutions that pledged the Volunteers to free Ireland “forever from English domination,” with every man swearing, “as he kissed the blade of his sword, that he would adhere to these resolutions to the last drop of his blood, which he would by no means spare, till we had finally achieved the independence of our country.” For Ireland, the American Revolution would provide a clear, if fleeting, opportunity for independence.3

  Britain’s war with America found little support among the Irish. Since the early days of colonization, Ireland had maintained close links with America. In an ideal position to engage in the colonial trade, Ireland rapidly became an integral part of the transatlantic economy, exporting cheap linens, butter, pork, and salted beef to the West Indies and North America in ever-growing amounts. With the burgeoning trade to the colonies came Irish immigrants—as many as 70,000 Scots-Irish from Ulster alone in the century before the revolution—in search of cheap land, often in the backcountry of the colonies. When war broke out with Britain, Irish immigrants were frequently found at the forefront of the revolution. Irishmen like Thomas Conway and Arthur Dillon helped lead the colonial war effort, and Irish settlers, especially the Ulstermen scratching out a living on the American frontier, overwhelmingly took up arms in support of their adopted nation.

  Many back in Ireland were sympathetic to the colonial cause as well. Early in 1776, at a performance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in Dublin, the spectators rioted when “Americans were styled rebels” in the play’s epilogue. The critique of British imperial policy and the movement to reform the relationship between metropole and colony that coalesced into revolution in America was not unique to the New World. Instead, it was merely one strand of a broader movement for imperial reform that included vocal advocates in Ireland and Britain as well. For many Irishmen, the connection between their own struggles for greater legislative independence and free trade and those of the rebellious colonies were clear enough. Ireland had been at least nominally an English imperial possession since the Normans invaded in 1171, a kingdom of the English monarch governed by a Lord Lieutenant appointed by the English crown. Under the Tudors, Poyning’s Law, reconfirmed under the Declaratory Act of George I in 1719, made Ireland’s Parliament subordinate to the Parliament of England. Ireland’s representatives could only propose legislation, which could be vetoed in Westminster. Fearful that Irish competition might undermine and outstrip England’s colonial trade, restrictions were placed on Irish trade beginning in the 1650s, forbidding direct trade between Ireland and the Americas and mandating that Irish trade must be conducted in English ships and flow through English ports. Thus, in many ways, Ireland’s political and economic position on the eve of the revolution was very similar to that of the American colonies, her Parliament subject to En
glish oversight and her trade restricted.4

  On both sides of the Atlantic, people were quick to realize the similarities between Ireland’s and America’s roles in the British Empire, and the implications of the American Revolution for Ireland. Indeed, as early as the Stamp Act crisis in the 1760s, American reformers had taken steps to ensure Irish support by exempting Irish goods from the colonial boycott of British commerce. When the confrontation between Britain and the colonies turned violent in 1775, it was clear to many that the constitutional issues at stake would affect Ireland, that a British victory would confirm Britain’s right to levy taxes on its imperial possessions without their consent, and that an American defeat might well spend the end of any hope for legislative independence in Ireland.

  From the beginning of the conflict, Irish newspapers were filled with discussions of the emerging war, and the Irish press churned out hundreds of pamphlets shouting support for America and opposition to British policies. When Parliament opened in Ireland in October of 1775, the war with America had divided its members. In the address to the Lord Lieutenant, the revolution was called a rebellion in keeping with official British policy. Others in Parliament, however, sought to make clear that though they disagreed with the method of American resistance, they saw the justness of the underlying grievances and opposed Britain’s military policy. Reformers in Parliament advocated conciliation and debated whether or not Irish troops should be sent to fight for Britain in America. Denis Daly condemned the war, warning that it would surely lead to greater taxation in Ireland, taxation that would be enforced by the sword if necessary. John Ponsonby concurred, adding that if Ireland helped Britain suppress American opposition to taxation, “she furnished an argument against herself.” Walter Hussey Burgh likewise urged Ireland to reject giving Irish aid for Britain’s war, declaring, “I foresee the consequences of this war. If the Ministers are victorious, it will only be establishing a right to harvest, after they have burned the grain—it will be establishing a right to the stream, after they have cut off the fountain.” Jonah Barrington spoke for many when he worried that: “The subjugation of America might confirm the dependence of Ireland,” and that Ireland could only hope to “obtain her own constitutional rights . . . by the complete success and triumph of her [Britain’s] colony.” The critics were quickly proved right in their fears for Ireland. In an attempt to starve the colonies of provisions and ensure the stable supply of their own forces, the government imposed an embargo on the export of Irish provisions to the colonies, souring the public mood even further.5