Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Five days later came the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Frederick the Great kept Silesia and Maria Theresa took back Saxony. Not for the last time, Germany had unleashed aggressive war, and not for the last time gained nothing tangible from it. Frederick promised to support Maria Theresas son as next head of the Holy Roman Empire. But he had established Prussia as a Great Power, and had given the world an astonishing and minatory demonstration of Germany’s military aptitudes and national tenacity. Furor Teutonicus was foreseeable (if not much foreseen). In Eastern Europe, Prussia was a doughty contender, but hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost in a war that, though it made Prussia a Great Power and enabled America to start thinking of independence, effected no significant changes to anything else in Europe. The 22-year-old George Washington had ignited a fateful conflict.

  The Seven Years’ War had been an utterly stupid war for everyone except the British and the Americans. They had gained a world, with a debt time bomb attached to it, and had perfected the technique, soon to be absolutely vital for compensating for France’s much larger population and greater national wealth. France had surrendered much of the prestige she had enjoyed from Richelieu to Louis XIV. The zigzag of French decline had begun, with the most dismal war in its history, prior to the severe beatings it would suffer (110 and 180 years later) in two out of three contests with a united Germany. William Pitt had been the great war statesman, Frederick the Great the great commander, and the whimsical Philadelphian printer and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the great strategic prophet.

  12. ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AFTER 1763

  The removal of France from North America made Britain dispensable to the American colonists, and the heavy costs of the British victory in the Seven Years’ War and the increased cohesion the colonies achieved in the war altered the correlation of forces between Britain and America. The British did not notice this, but the more astute Americans did.

  At first, all was well in Anglo-American relations, as the dispatch of the French was celebrated by both. As early as 1754, Franklin, renowned throughout the world as a scientist, and a prodigious talent in other areas as well, had exposed to his learned British friend Peter Collinson, a successful merchant but also a distinguished naturalist, his opinion that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one Whole, and not different states with separate Interests.” He had abandoned his previous hope, broached but frustrated at the Albany Congress earlier in 1754 (which had been convened at the request of the British Board of Trade, a government ministry), for colonial unity of purpose and action. He still favored a Grand Council of all the colonies, chosen by the individual colonial assemblies and presided over by a President General, who would represent the monarch of Britain and America. This was the heart of his plan at Albany. The Grand Council would operate independently of the British Parliament. This largely prefigured constitutional dispositions in America and the British Commonwealth, but Franklin made little progress with it at this stage. The prime minister, Newcastle, completely ignored the proposal when it was presented to him by the Board of Trade in 1754.15

  When Franklin had persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to set up a colonial militia after the catastrophe on the Monongahela, and accepted a colonelcy in it, so great was the concern about Pennsylvania’s open western border that the British government vetoed the creation of the militia. British reaction to autonomous gestures in the colonies was reflexive and hostile. Franklin, an optimist, chose not to set too much store by that, and the ensuing war buried the hatchet between the British and their colonies (in the heads and torsos of their shared enemies). Even Franklin’s astounding and relentless powers of persuasion made few converts to his idea of trans-Atlantic organization or any devolution like it when he returned as representative (lobbyist, in fact) for Pennsylvania in London in 1764 after a brief absence. He had already been elected a member of the Royal Society and soon was awarded honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford (and had as much right to be called Doctor as Samuel Johnson). The British greatly respected Franklin and much liked him, but they did not connect their regard for him with any notion that the American colonies possessed any aptitude or representative desire for self-government. Franklin gleaned a notion of what he was facing in 1760, when Collinson arranged a meeting with the president of the King’s Privy Council, Lord Granville, one of the most influential members of the government. Granville wished to discuss the military scene in America, but added, in an unpromising aside, that “The king is the Legislator of the Colonies,” and his will was “the law of the land.” Franklin’s polite remonstrations made no headway.16

  When Franklin returned to London in 1764, his chief preoccupation, bizarrely, was to bring Pennsylvania more directly under British rule, in order to emancipate it from what he rightly considered the bigoted autocracy of the Penn family. He had fought against this in various capacities in Philadelphia and construed it as his duty to seek the most likely possible easement of the arbitrariness of the Penns, and so called for the prerogatives of the existing legislature to be gutted, prior to the establishment of a federal colonial authority. His wishes would come to pass, but not as he had initially foreseen. One of Franklin’s closest British friends and one of the country’s leading solicitors, Richard Jackson, told Franklin shortly after the Treaty of Paris was signed that Britain intended to keep 10,000 troops in America, at the expense of the colonies. Franklin replied that the more costs Britain inflicted on the colonies, the less revenue it could expect to have remitted to Britain, recognizing at once the problem the victorious Empire faced. “It is not worth your while. The more you oblige us to pay here, the less you can receive there.” Six months later, Jackson, by then a member of Parliament, wrote to him that “200,000 pounds will infallibly be raised by Parliament on the plantations.” Franklin replied that he was “not much alarm’d.... You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burthens upon us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting yourselves.”17 He wrote to Collinson in the same line: “I think there is scarce anything you can do that may be hurtful to us, but what will be as much or more so to you. This must be our chief security.”18

  13. THE STAMP ACT

  Shortly after Franklin’s return to London in 1764, debate began on the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on printed and paper goods in the colonies, including even newspapers and decks of cards, and was so called because payment of the tax was certified by a stamp on the article taxed. Britain already had such a tax domestically. Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (not to be confused with Lord Granville), was leader of the government in the House of Commons. In presenting the measure, Grenville claimed the right of Parliament to levy taxes anywhere in the Empire, which was not contested by his fellow legislators, but he gave the colonies a year to propose alternatives. None did so, although Franklin himself did. Franklin achieved prodigies of diplomatic access and advocacy, but he had no legitimate status at all, and was merely an information service from Pennsylvania and other colonies that engaged him, to the British government, establishment, and public. Franklin’s proposal was to have Parliament establish a colonial credit office that would issue bills of credit in the colonies, and collect 6 percent for renewal of the bills each year, and these could be used as currency. Gold and silver currency were scarce in the colonies, as all transactions with Britain had to be paid in cash, and Parliament had forbidden the issuance of paper money in America. Franklin’s theory was that this would be an adequately disguised tax, and would not be unpopular in America because of the desire there for paper money to replace an inordinate mass of informal IOUs. It isn’t clear how the interest would have been collected, or how inflation would have been avoided, but at least it was creative thinking, and a start.

  Franklin subscribed to the theory of his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke that popular discussion of rights was a sure sign of misgovernment, and he watched with concern as the revenue-raising tax became a noisy trans-Atlantic debate about the rig
ht to tax. Franklin was shocked at the proportions of the outrage in the colonies when the stamp tax was imposed, in November 1765. There was in the stamp tax a move to tax harmonization in the Empire, but also to strike a preemptive blow for the untrammeled rights of the Imperial Parliament. The English suspected some of the colonial leaders of aspiring to independence, and that must have been correct.19 But they acted in a way that could have been reasonably assumed to fan and inflame that sentiment, not defuse or douse it. The British political class assumed that while there were agitators for independence in America, they were opportunists, rabble-rousers, and scoundrels, and that the great majority were committed Englishmen, loyal to the Crown, come what may. That sentiment was strong, but what the British, from the king down, failed to grasp was that loyalty to the Crown in America depended on the wearer of the Crown appearing to be the impartial arbiter, when necessary, of the interests of all his subjects. If the king were to seem solely interested in upholding the British side of an argument with the Americans, that loyalty, in the face of the higher and more imminent patriotic interest of the colonists, supplemented by their material interests, would quickly evaporate. The British had not sent talented governors to America, with rare exceptions, and as has been mentioned, the conduct of the military expedition leaders had been heavy-handed with the colonists, and completely ineffectual with the French and Indians, prior to Pitt’s taking control of the Seven Years’ War in 1758.

  The theory of parliamentary representation of all interests was strained, in part because Parliament was riddled with constituencies that had very few people in them, were controlled by influential individuals, and in any case did not represent the colonies at all, other than in the sense that the national interest of the home islands required some consideration of the Americans. (There were about 9.5 million people in the British Isles, including over two million Irish Roman Catholics who were a good deal more dissentient in spirit as subjects of the British Parliament than the Americans at their most unenthusiastic; there was an electorate of about 300,000, scattered extremely unevenly through about 540 constituencies, and the appointive and hereditary House of Lords had greater powers than the House of Commons.) Even had it been a broad suffrage with equal representation for all districts, it would still have been scandalous non-representation of the Americans, the wealthiest part of the British-governed world with, by the mid-1770s, about 30 percent of the population of Britain, about 70 percent of the population of Prussia, which had just held the great Austrian and Russian Empires at bay for almost seven years, and a greater population than the Netherlands or Sweden, noteworthy powers that had swayed the destinies of Europe at times in the previous 150 years. (Admittedly, about 8 percent of the Americans were unenfranchised slaves, who had only the rights their owners allowed from one moment to the next.)

  On the other side, the Americans knew that Britain had saved them from a most unappetizing fate at the hands of the French, a prospect made more gruesome and horrifying by any contemplation of what the Indians might have done to make the lives of the colonists shorter and more uncongenial. All informed Americans knew that Britain had gone a long way into debt doing so, and as America was the most prosperous part of the Empire, it had some obligation to shoulder a proportionate share of the cost. It is impossible, at this remove, and buried as these matters now are in the folkloric mythology of the creation of the United States, to guess what degree of unvarnished cynicism might have hastened and made louder the American caterwauling about rights, and the corresponding failure to make any suggestion, apart from Franklin’s worthy improvisation, of an alternative to the stamp tax to retire the debt incurred in the military salvation of America.

  The Pennsylvania Assembly adopted a resolution strenuously condemning the Stamp Act, as did the Virginia Assembly, under the influence of the fiery orator Patrick Henry, who advised George III to contemplate the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if either the men or their fates were in the slightest similar, and seeming to condone their ends, an assassination and a pseudo-judicial murder, shortly leading in each case to the elevation of their heirs). The Virginians asserted that the tax was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust.... The inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatever upon them,” apart from those legislated in Virginia. This response was known as the Virginia Resolves and was emulated by most of the colonies. The British had designated collectors of the tax, who were pressured into refusing to collect it. With the tax in effect but not being collected, and demonstrations verging on violence around the colonies, nine of the colonies met in New York and declared that taxes could be imposed on the colonists only with their personal consent or that of their elected representatives. This was represented as part of the birthright of Englishmen. It was a stirring stand for individual liberty and rugged individualism, but was nonsense in fact. No sane person will volunteer to be taxed, other than in a severe community or national emergency, and Englishmen were taxed all the time with only a vote of an undemocratically elected House of Commons and a House of Lords that would recoil in horror at the thought that it was answerable to the taxpayers. (It should not be imagined that the colonial houses of assembly had a greatly larger percentage of representation on their voters’ lists, although the procedure of what became known as gerrymandering [after the redistricting artistry of the fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry] had not had the time to plumb the depths of electoral vote-rigging that existed in England.) The rights Englishmen possessed, which distinguished them from most nationalities, except for some Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavians, were freedom of speech and assembly, and access to generally fairly independent courts, as well as some participatory legislative processes, and the Americans received them from and shared them with the British.

  14. FRANKLIN’S DIPLOMACY IN LONDON, 1764–1767

  The Americans, Franklin was convinced, didn’t want independence, but they wanted an end to inferiority. They recognized the British right to regulate trade between parts of the Empire, but not to do anything that really touched the lives of the colonists. The problem with this outlook was that it amounted to Britain’s having the high privilege of assuring the security of the colonists, at British expense, and no authority to require anything of the colonists in return. Even if such a thing could be negotiated for the future, it left Britain with the heavy cost of having thrown the French out of North America, to protect the colonists, with the beneficiaries loudly claiming that it was their birthright as Englishmen, and the most well-to-do group of Englishmen at that, to refuse to pay anything toward their own salvation. That would not work as the modus operandi of a functioning empire.

  On the other side, the British imagined that they could do what they wished legislating over and for the colonists, that there was any truth to the fiction that the British Parliament represented the Americans, that the colonists, like those in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, had no capacity whatever for self-government, and that no American could possibly wish it except a few political demagogues and self-seekers. The Empire was not going to last long on such a flimsy foundation as that, either. It was in this deepening vortex that Franklin worked in London.

  Franklin had thought of American representation in the British Parliament, but it was soon clear that matters had deteriorated too far for that. The Americans would not seek it, in the same measure that the British would not offer it. There was already an obvious danger of armed conflict, as there was much talk in London of sending the British army to collect the stamp tax. Fortunately the ministry changed, and Pitt’s friend the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister. Franklin met the new president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, and proposed the suspension of the Stamp Act, until the colonies’ debt levels, which he attributed to the fiscal rigors of the late war, had subsided. (They were modest compared with Britain’s.) And then the Stamp Act could quietly expire. He also warned that the use of armed force
to collect taxes in America would fail, as the soldiers would be induced to desert in large numbers by the higher pay scales of the American private sector, and by the impossibility of rounding up deserters in a country so vast and absorbent of dissenters.

  On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament in effect to answer for America. He did so brilliantly. He protested American loyalty, which had been affected by the British imposition of “an internal tax.” There had never been any objection to taxes on exports. Partly because of Franklin’s efforts, the British repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but accompanied that move with the Declaratory Act, which averred that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Franklin wasn’t much bothered by that declaration, as long as nothing was done about it. He cherished a reform of the Empire that would cause Britain to shed even its right to excise taxes on exports. He was more convinced than ever that eventually America would surpass Britain and foresaw a gradual inversion of the relationship, that the American country would be the senior partner. A man of immense subtlety, congeniality, and diplomacy, Franklin exaggerated the ability of others to reason as thoughtfully as he did.