The answer to the latter question is ‘No’. Independence from the Crown was inevitable. To see how the Boston Tea Party occurred when it did, we have to see what was going on in Britain and, by extension, in India during the 1760s and 1770s.
We have already seen that Grenville went in 1765, to be replaced by Rockingham. Rockingham lost his job in the summer of 1766 having repealed the Stamp Act, but having failed to sort out much else. Pitt the Elder did not wish to become Prime Minister once more. He was unhealthy and could not expect to control the Commons. Pitt had been made Earl of Chatham, thus losing credibility as the people’s Prime Minister. The Marquess of Rockingham had tried to run Parliament from the Lords and had failed. Pitt was not going to be any more successful, especially as he had not the physical, never mind the political, stamina. Almost from the time he assumed office in 1766 until October 1768, Pitt, or Chatham as now he was, provided no sure leadership. During this period, with Parliament losing its way, the American colonial opposition was even more difficult to judge and therefore handle.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1766–7 was Charles Townshend (1725–67). Townshend exploited the colonial notion that they were willing to accept Parliament’s authority to legislate on issues of trade. Townshend, through his 1767 American Import Duties Act, put heavy import duties on glass, paint, paper and tea entering America. No one doubted that he simply wanted to raise money to cover the cost of administering the North American colonies. The Act caused more trouble than it was worth. Not much money, if any, was collected and the colonists became even more displeased with Parliament. By 1769 most North American assemblies had come close to challenging the authority of the Crown. This stance verged upon treason.
Pitt the Elder survived until by the autumn of 1768 when he became too ill to carry on in office. The Duke of Grafton, Augustus FitzRoy (1735–1811) replaced him, but he had no more idea of what to do than had Pitt. Moreover, Grafton was really a Pittite and therefore was not going to produce radical policies. He would have wished to be more understanding towards the American colonists, but pressing political difficulties at home didn’t allow time to fully concentrate on thinking through and implementing any conciliatory colonial policy. His administration was preoccupied with the so-called Wilkes affair. John Wilkes (1727–97) was a Radical accused of seditious libel and in 1768, although elected MP for Middlesex, was imprisoned as an outlaw.
Lord North replaced Grafton in 1770. North’s was a courtesy title (he was heir to the Earldom of Guildford) and he sat in the Commons. One of his first decisions was to remove all but the tea tax put in place by Grafton’s Act. At first North, who would be Prime Minister for twelve years, appeared self-assured and able to exploit the fact that, in spite of the influence of George III, he was running Parliament from inside the Commons. This may not have satisfied all the American colonists, but for the moment it eased transatlantic tension. Now from London to Bengal.
As discussed, Warren Hastings had become Governor General of India in 1733. Later a tragic figure, who was impeached for corruption, he established what would become known as the British Raj. If Hastings settled, if not resolved, many of the diplomatic and administrative difficulties of the Crown and the Company he failed, inevitably, to balance the Company books. British interests were verging on insolvency. It was at this point in the 1770s that the Crown thought it could resolve some of the Company’s problems by using the American colonies. The answer, so the government thought, was in tea. The East India Company had seventeen million pounds of tea that it could not sell. The price of tea in Britain was inflated by the import duty of more than 100 per cent. The Americans, however, paid much less in import duties. But we have to remember that the independently minded American colonists were, as it suited them, boycotting goods from Britain and refused to be used by the Crown. The government ignored these sentiments. It decreed that the duty on tea imports to Britain would remain at the present level. However, tea exported or re-exported to America would only be liable for the much lower American tax rates. The Crown then, in its belief that it could impose its will, announced that seven million pounds of the Company’s tea surplus could be shifted into America.
At this point some of the American colonists, reading what they believed to be subterfuge by the British, asserted their independence. Sam Adams organized the dumping of the tea imports over the side of the ships. This defiance on 16 December 1773 became known as the Boston Tea Party. Parliament in London announced that by law it was closing down the government of Boston and promised to exact compensation for the East India Company from the people of that town. Parliament had underestimated the reaction to this legislation, which became known as the Intolerable Acts. The Acts asserted in the Boston Port Bill that the harbour would be closed until compensation had been paid. The Massachusetts Government Act revoked the charter of the colony. The Quartering Act gave the governor of Massachusetts authority to billet any of his troops in the homes of any settlers he so chose. Moreover, a piece of Parliamentary legislation, which at first sight had nothing to do with Boston, was also seen as an assault on the independence of the settlers. This was the Quebec Act of 1774, which fulfilled promises that Roman Catholics should have greater freedoms and that Catholics would be allowed, for the first time, to be members of the Quebec Council. It might be remembered that Quebec was a colony where all but fewer than 10 per cent of the population were Catholics and French-speaking. Catholics were not allowed to sit in Parliament in England and so the British settlers in Montreal could not see why they should be threatened by an overwhelming majority of Catholics. Moreover, the 1774 Act increased the territory of Quebec. What had this to do with the Boston Tea Party? Settlers far beyond that port saw this as an example of George III’s government imposing its will and even driving a wedge into the prejudice that insisted Catholics were lower class citizens. In other words the social, religious and even administrative structure of the colonists was threatened.
This new, and to the colonists, threatening legislation was the catalyst for the action which resulted in twelve of the colonies (Georgia was absent) meeting in Philadelphia, in the autumn of 1774, for the first of what became known as a Continental Congress.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) argued at that Congress that the assemblies should have as many rights of legislation as the Parliament in London. There was a sense that the American colonists had an instinctive appeal to the ancient practice of kingship. In one of its forms, kingship is when the people declare allegiance to the monarch in return for the monarch’s protection. That protection is against invaders and, most importantly, against government, for the monarch is supposed to be above government and is the patron of all the peoples. The colonists’ instinct was that George III would protect them against Parliamentary authority.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Parliament believed it had considerable sway over the monarch. It was only partially right in this judgement. The weakness in Parliament’s assumption was that George III did not trust his senior ministers. Thus, this monarch asserted his constitutional authority and insisted that his Prime Minister, Lord North, gave it expression through Parliament. Here was the basis of how Britain and its monarch dealt with the American colonists and therefore the charge that it was George III who lost America.
The 1774 Congress in Philadelphia was the basis of turning the feelings of those rebellious colonists into practical opposition to the British government. Immediately after Philadelphia, British spies began amassing evidence that what had been a political rebellion was turning into a military opposition. This led to the opening shots in the American War of Independence. In April 1775, British troops were sent to Concord. Their task was to seize an arms cache held by the rebels. In May 1775, the second Continental Congress met (now including Georgia). It took the overwhelming decision to raise an army against the British in Massachusetts. The congressional members had an uneasy time of it. At that point it is doubtful that the majority wanted inde
pendence, but they refused to accept the unexamined will of the British Parliament. There was still hope for a compromise. This was expressed in the Congress’s so-called Olive Branch Petition to the King, by which America would remain loyal to the Crown if either trade or tax controls were lifted. The petitions’ sincerity was questioned and the King rejected it. George Washington was tasked with raising the army. Even the offer of a token arrangement of British sovereignty was now unlikely, even impossible, to achieve.
In spite of the importance of the event it is not the place of this book to describe in detail the American War of Independence. For our purposes it should be sufficient to give a brief description and a recapitulation of causes. The American Revolution began in 1775 and ended in 1783. There were thirteen American colonies at the time. They were: Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia. Collectively they claimed that the population was continuously angry over the British Parliament’s insistence that it had the right to tax in all departments, the settlers. There were three illustrations of this antagonism. Firstly, in 1770, five colonists were killed and many more wounded when British troops opened fire on the settlers at Boston. Secondly, on 16 December 1773, there were the events surrounding the Boston Tea Party. Thirdly, in 1774 Britain imposed Intolerable Acts. From this point major confrontation seemed inevitable.
In April 1775 the War began at Concord and Lexington. On 4 July 1776, a congress of the American colonies made the Declaration of Independence. George Washington was shortly after defeated by the British forces commanded by General William Howe at White Plains. The following year, 1777, saw the famous battle of Saratoga. General John Burgoyne’s British army of some 5,000 troops was forced to surrender to the superior sized army of General Gates.39 This single victory inspired the French to join the Americans in the war against their old enemy, the British. Until the beginning of 1781 the British forces, both at sea and on land, did well but their downfall soon came. On 19 October 1781 General Charles Cornwallis, later the first Marquess Cornwallis,40 and his British forces were surrounded at Yorktown in Virginia. American and French troops, commanded by George Washington, controlled the land approaches to the peninsula and French ships had command of the sea lanes. Cornwallis was forced to surrender.
Yorktown probably did more than any other incident to convince British public opinion that the war against the American colonists could not be won. The naval confrontations, especially in the West Indies, by and large went Britain’s way. However, naval battles do not decide wars. He who holds the land mass commands the future. In 1783 America became independent of Britain by the Treaty of Versailles (sometime known as the Treaty of Paris).
And what happened to that territory north of America that most certainly had not been part of any revolution? Canada had become a secure British territory. By 1763, the decade before the American Revolution, the British controlled Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec (and had done for half a century), Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton Island. There would be rebellion, but not for decades. None of this meant that Canada might not join the revolution, or certainly watch with interest: after all, at the time of the Boston Tea Party, Canada was 95 per cent French-speaking and Catholic. The advantage to the British was that the territory was sparsely populated and often preoccupied with its seasonal interests. For example, Newfoundland was mainly fishing. The important area of Nova Scotia was almost barren. Fur trapping and trading meant that there was enough to get on with battling the elements and little energy left for fighting bureaucracy.
Given the climate and pickings, part of Canada functioned properly only during seasons. Yet it was hardly a backwater of British interests in North America, although it was not at the centre of the Crown’s plans for colonial expansion. Just as the emerging North American settlements had been populated by economic, religious and political refugees from Britain, now after the American War of Independence Canada provided the haven for tens of thousands of settlers who did not wish to live under the government of the United States of America. That the territory should be populated by loyalists was, of course, to the Crown’s advantage. Equally, loyalty comes at a price and the new settlers in Canada needed extravagant land grants and bursaries to succeed. Nor could the new Canadians simply sweep aside those settlers already in place. With certain and obvious exceptions the British English-speaking migrants settled alongside French-speaking Canadians. Whatever their instincts and origins, both French and British Canadians were united in their suspicions, and sometimes outright antagonism, towards republican Americans south of the border. The original settlements were north of New England and in the young territory of New Brunswick. However, it was hardly any time at all before the trappers and traders inched westwards. The boundaries were shifting and the sometimes ill-defined settlements around the Great Lakes existed in some fragile peace. By the time that Britain was at war once more with France in 1794, the differences between the North American straggle of British loyalists and those already in Canada were already sharply defined. For example, the North West Company formed in 1785 was in direct competition with the eastern-based traders, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company.
North America was, by the final decade of the eighteenth century, abuzz with new exploration. The hero of this period in British colonial history was probably the Stornoway man, Alexander Mackenzie (1764–1820). It was Mackenzie who became the first European to cross Canada from the east and then the Rockies to the Pacific. This was not the beginning of the Scottish ‘occupation’ of Canada, but it was certainly a reminder to us of what Michael Fry has called ‘the building of the Scottish Empire’.41 Here was the genesis of the notion that the English found themselves with an empire run by the Scots.
Scotland was never big enough to have its own empire. It had neither the history of government and monarchy that would allow that, nor the financial institutions to encourage it. The picture after 1603 and the Union of the Crowns is confusing because although the Stuarts were then on the English throne, they did not speak for Scotland in isolation. The concepts of settlement and trade as being distinctive components of empire were not options for the Scots alone. The Union, not of the two Crowns, but of the two constitutions in 1707 blurred the financial and administrative minds that meant the two nations could not have similar ambitions. Individuals such as Donald Macdonald, James Murray and Mackenzie left more than a mark on eighteenth-century colonialism. Yet behind their efforts were financial and constitutional possibilities that emanated not from Edinburgh but from London. Earlier in the century Colonel Samuel Vetch (1668–1732), the Scottish governor of Nova Scotia, had sought support from the Crown for his idea that Canada should be claimed by the British. His case was made in his paper Canada Survey’d. His argument was that Canada could be a base for the fish and fur trade as well as the eastern seaboard being a centre for victualling for the navy. Whatever sense was seen in London was always difficult for people on the ground to follow, even when instructions came as a result of their own suggestions.
There was a conflict between those who had to run an outpost of empire and those left behind in London. It mattered not the origins of the administrator. The mood and perception of the Crown and its officers supposedly decided the way of governance. We might consider Quebec, captured by mainly Highlanders in 1759 when it was governed by the Scot, James Murray. Murray wanted to be a liberal governor because he thought that was the simplest way of avoiding conflict. There was a great sense in what Murray proposed. The irony that the American settlers had included religious tolerance among their reasons for fleeing Europe, particularly England, was hardly lost on the French Catholic majority in Canada. Murray thought religious tolerance should be utterly acceptable and that furthermore, it would inspire loyalty, if inspiration were needed, against the Americans. This was sensible anticipation because the American War of Independence had not yet been fought. W
e can imagine his chagrin when the British government told Governor Murray that they wanted nothing to do with a multiracial society and that the territory of Quebec should be anglicized forthwith. Murray thought this a silly as well as unjust instruction and so was recalled. That the 1774 Quebec Act allowed for religious toleration was rather late payment of compensation for the original oppression. Yet Canada was no different from earlier colonies. Decisions made elsewhere, too frequently never allowed for local circumstances. A territory was to be used as a dumping ground of those in Britain who were considered surplus to requirements. So it was in Canada during the second half of the eighteenth century. Emptying the Scottish Highlands appeared to be something of a priority and, in 1773, 200 Highlanders arrived in Nova Scotia. It was all very well providing masses of land, but where was the money to come from necessary to support the new settlements? There was precious little money available, but the migration had begun and yet again the determination of not just the few but quite many converted opportunity into relative success.
The Scots took with them more than a tartan. Gaelic was commonly spoken in parts of Canada well into the twentieth century. The clan allegiances survived the transatlantic crossings; indeed many hardships were overcome because of those family loyalties. Migration helped preserve clan and Highland identification. Less successful, although attempted, was the British vision of colonial settlement whereby the atmosphere and custom of the home counties might be faithfully reproduced and supported by the social, legal and constitutional framework of England. For much of the year Canada was an inhospitable place, as indeed were the Highlands, and in a few places ‘little Scotlands’ flourished. Certainly before the American War of Independence, migration from Scotland was, in terms of percentage of population, as great as it was from England. The profits to be made were no less important than those to be fetched from India. Little wonder that in the second half of the eighteenth century some 200 companies had been established in Canada with investors registered in Scotland. By the end of that century the most prosperous effort in Canada would appear to have been in the hands of the Scottish merchants of Montreal. Fry argues that the Scots themselves in Canada wanted to control immigration. They wanted to protect their interests: ‘their trade, principally in furs, could indeed only continue as long as it [Canada] remained empty since tilled land yielded no furs’.42
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