by Simon Schama
What the king ought to be, wrote Thomas Jefferson in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, prepared for the Congress, was ‘the chief officer of the people’, who presumably could be dismissed and replaced if he failed to honour his contractual obligations to his subjects. But Jefferson was too ill to go to Philadelphia and those radicals who did – some of whom demanded that citizens begin military training – did not dominate the proceedings. Cooler heads argued for a breathing space in which parliament and the king might be petitioned to hear the justified grievances of America. It was, moreover, a long, deep breathing space. Only if redress of those grievances had not been made by 10 September 1775 – a year hence – would the Americans begin a general cessation of all trade with Britain from 1 December.
It was a last, priceless opportunity for reconciliation, and it was not taken. Not, however, for want of statesmen on both sides recognizing that such a grace period might never come again. Even Lord North was attempting to hammer out some sort of middle way in which, if the colonies would agree to the sums needed for their own defence, they would be free to raise them in their own fashion and through their own assemblies. But could the British government, North asked an American representative, be assured that the several colonies would agree to their respective apportionments? No such assurance could be given. And, in any event, America had already gone past the point where it could be expected to accept even the principle of being taxed by the parliament at Westminster. For the king himself these last-minute efforts to cobble together some sort of agreement were so much sticking plaster over an open wound. Was it not evident, George asserted, that the colonists’ pretence of disputing this or that imposition was so much disingenuous tomfoolery; that they had all along conspired to throw off the entire authority of parliament altogether? The only question now, as far as he was concerned, was whether the Americans were to be allowed to remove themselves from the allegiance they owed to their sovereign – king and parliament – without at least a fight.
Opinion inside Britain in the winter of 1774–5 was bitterly and frantically divided, especially in the mercantile cities whose trade faced catastrophe should war break out. Rival groups petitioning for reconciliation or military action contested for the same meeting halls in Manchester and Bristol and for the same signatures of mechanics and shopkeepers. Parliament was dominated by calls to inflict on the wicked and ungrateful children across the Atlantic a hiding they would never forget. On 20 January 1775 William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, and tormented by sickness, arrived at the House of Lords in the company of his fifteen-year-old son William and Benjamin Franklin – with whom, at last, he had had earnest conversations about what, if anything, could be done to halt the march towards imperial self-destruction. Franklin was turned away from the door on the grounds that he was neither the eldest son nor the brother of a peer. Chatham entered, remarking as loudly as he could, ‘This is Dr FRANKLIN whom I would have admitted.’ He then put a motion to withdraw General Gage’s troops from Boston, in other words to stop a war before it started. Though few of his peers believed it, he promised them it would be unwinnable. What he then went on to say proved just how carefully the old man had listened to Franklin. For the first time he was staring at the vast expanse of America, and he knew he was staring at defeat. ‘What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary submission . . . how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you? . . . to grasp the dominion of 1800 miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty and resistance?’
And where did the peers who denounced the Americans for their temerity imagine their stubborn attachment to representation came from? Had they looked in the mirror lately? Had they read any good books about their own history lately?
This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen . . . it was obvious . . . from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. . . . The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same spirit which formerly opposed . . . ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution. . . . This glorious spirit animates three millions in America . . . who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as freemen.
To such united force, what force shall be opposed? – What, my Lords – a few regiments in America, and seventeen or eighteen thousand men at home! The idea is too ridiculous to take up a moment of your Lordships’ time. . . . It is not repealing a piece of parchment that can restore America to our bosom; you must repeal her fears and her resentments and you may then hope for her love and gratitude . . . We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract: let us retract when we can, not when we must. . . . Avoid then this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. . . . Make the first advances to concord, to peace and happiness.
But the first advances were to Concord, Massachusetts, where, so General Gage had heard, the ‘rebels’ – for so they were already dubbed in the British garrison – had stored arms and ammunition. Throughout the late winter, not only in Massachusetts but in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well, the committees of correspondence had been taking steps to organize the defence of their own communities in citizen militias, hastened by rumours that not only British but foreign mercenary troops too (the armed lackeys of satanic despotism!) were on their way to America. On 18 April 1775 John Hancock and Samuel Adams were in Lexington where a company of ‘minutemen’ – a militia of farmers who could be instantly summoned in the event of an emergency – had been formed, guarding a cache of munitions. It was already known that Gage intended to march troops west to Lexington to arrest Adams and Hancock and seize the weapons. And the fact that for three days grenadiers and marines had been taken off duty and boats made ready was unlikely to keep the raid a secret. The only unknown was when this descent on the hamlets across the Charles river would take place; hence the famous arrangement by which a signal lantern would be set in the steeple of Old North Church to alert patriots in Charlestown to the departure of the soldiers – two for an approach by water, one by land. Three riders were to be dispatched to warn Hancock and Adams. One was arrested before he could depart; the other two, William Dawes and Paul Revere, got out of Boston, Revere rowing across the Charles beneath the guns of a British warship. Picking up a horse at Charlestown, he took the longer route but arrived first at the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s vicarage just by Lexington Green. In the moonlight the green looked then (as it still does) the epitome of an English village, the kind of place that seems to describe the perpetuity of British America and not its imminent death-rattle.
Revere tried to carry his warning to Concord but was arrested by a British patrol before he reached there. But word was out. Hancock and Adams departed swiftly for Woburn and safety, the beginning of what would be a long journey through America, publicizing the events of the morning about to dawn. All around Boston, alarm bells and signal guns were sounding. When the six companies of British troops arrived at Lexington, just before light, they were confronted by about seventy minutemen drawn up on the green. One of the officers shouted, ‘Disperse, ye rebels!’, and the militia officer, Captain Parker, did apparently order a dismissal. While it was happening, a shot was let off, from which side, no one was sure. But the grenadiers let fly a musket volley. When the smoke cleared, eight men were dead and ten wounded.
At Concord the British cut down a Liberty tree and then faced a serious firefight, shot at from a hilltop by the Old North Bridge. Their retreat back through Menotomy to Charlestown turned into a nightmare as they were riddled with gunfire by more than a thousand militia often firing from behind walls and the cover of trees. This was not going to be an easy war.
News of the events of 18 and 19 April were carried ‘on wings of wind’ through the colonies, not least by Hancock and Adams who had been singled out by General Gage as the
only rebels to be exempt from a pardon. By the time they reached Manhattan island, the streets were thick with impassioned crowds. In May the second Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia, appointed a Virginian, George Washington, to take command of their army of defence, signalling that Boston’s war was now America’s. Throughout the summer, the British found themselves effectively besieged by an American army whose size and strength they had never remotely anticipated from rude colonials. In June, Gage sent a formidable army up Breed’s Hill to break the American position on Charlestown Heights, and in the process lost 92 officers and nearly 1000 men. They included Major Pitcairn, who had been at Lexington on 19 April and had sent a letter to London that had been shown to the king, who shared the major’s opinion that ‘once the rebels have felt a smart blow . . . they will submit’. By the time George III read it, Pitcairn was dead. Stunned by the casualties, Gage wrote to Viscount Barrington, Secretary-at-War, that the Americans were ‘spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever a people were possessed of . . . The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear.’ In response he was heavily reinforced, so that by July there were 13,500 British troops in Boston together with many thousands more loyalist refugees. But even with this enormous force it was not clear how long they could hold the city.
There was a war, but there was not yet anything like agreement among the Americans on its ultimate goal. The second Continental Congress remained divided. Could union with Britain be preserved if its government took America back to the halcyon days before 1763 and agreed to a broad degree of self-government including the right of self-taxation? Or was absolute independence now the only possible option? In early July 1775, Congress produced a declaration of ‘the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms’, which said that: ‘We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing independent states. We fight not for glory or conquest. We exhibit to mankind the remarkable spectacle of a people attacked by unprovoked enemies.’ Two days later an ‘olive branch’ petition from Congress, drafted by the Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, was sent to the king through the hands of the grandson of the colony’s founder, William Penn. It began with a profuse statement of loyalty:
Attached to your Majesty’s person, family and government with all devotion that principle and affection can inspire, connected with Great Britain by the strongest ties that can unite societies . . . we solemnly assure Your Majesty, that we not only most ardently desire the former harmony between her and these Colonies may be restored, but that a concord may be established between them upon so firm a basis as to perpetuate its blessings, uninterrupted by any future dissensions to succeeding generations in both countries.
It was the last, best chance to save British America, and George III’s ministers were having none of it. At such critical moments in the fate of nations and empires the historian wants to reach for some deep, sophisticated structural socio-political explanation. But what turned the corner, what made reunion out of the question, was, all too simply, the king and his government. They let it be known that the king was not interested in any communication from an assembly of rebels. On 23 August the Americans were formally proclaimed to be in a state of ‘open and avowed rebellion’. On 26 October they insisted that the revolt was ‘manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire’. It was George III and his advisers, then, who spelled it out, who in effect uttered a declaration of independence; and figures like Jefferson who, even as late as November 1775, were professing their deep reluctance to make a complete break, were also calling the king ‘the sceptred tyrant’ and ‘the bitterest enemy we have’. The trouble was, this time no William III was at hand to appear as a constitutional king of America.
For Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense appeared in January 1776, no more kings need apply. Delude yourselves no further about the sainted British constitution, he argued. It is a sham and a ruin. Have no more to do with it: “Tis time to part.’ But though Paine’s tract sold a staggering 150,000 copies, the founding fathers – John Adams and Jefferson in particular – were not so much men of a new democratic age as to be able, yet, to unhitch themselves from the great tradition of expressly English Liberty. If they were at war with the British Empire it was because it was the wrong empire: not the empire of liberty at all, but an unrecognizable perversion of the principles on which it had been founded. Even when they did take their pens in hand and finally draft declarations of independence in the late spring and early summer of 1776, after the British had evacuated Boston and the British government still refused to spell out the terms on which peace might be made, the nation builders instinctively reached back, not forward, to their pantheon of heroes. They were the same heroes who had appeared in Lord Cobham’s monument at Stowe – Hampden, Milton and William III. In 1774, after hearing the news of Boston’s coercion, and thinking about the future constitution of their state, Jefferson and some of his colleagues in the Virginia House of Burgesses trawled through John Rushworth’s Historical Collections of documents from the epic of parliament’s struggle with Charles I. And when he came, finally, to draft the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s model for the long list of accusations against George III was the Bill of Rights of 1689 written to justify the removal of James II.
No one felt the irony more sharply than Chatham. He had repeatedly attempted to stop the war in its tracks, to no avail. Even in the unlikely circumstances that it would be won, it would, he told the Lords in January 1777, be a pyrrhic victory, for ‘we are the aggressors. We have invaded them.’ Everything he had made, even the triumph over France, was now unmade, for the old enemy was merely biding its time to profit from the débâcle. After the failure of the Saratoga campaign to isolate New England from the other colonies in October 1777, when North was desperate to resign and even George III was beginning to look for an exit from disaster, Chatham was spoken of, crippled as he was, as the logical man to make a simultaneous peace with an independent America and war with a newly threatening France. On 7 April 1778, in extreme pain, the famous vessel of his voice broken and halting, Chatham spoke in the Lords, still hoping that some sort of connection might be preserved between America and Britain, but ready to face, if necessary, a hostile alliance of France, Spain and America. ‘Any state is better than despair . . . if we fall let us fall like men.’ What use is valour, said the Duke of Richmond, when we have no navy, no army, no money? Chatham looked as though he would reply. He struggled heavily to his feet, swayed, staggered a little, clutched his hand to his heart and fell into the arms of peers sitting close by, one of them the master of Stowe, Lord Temple. When he died on 11 May the empire of liberty, the right empire, died with him.
On 12 September 1786, Charles, second Earl Cornwallis, stepped from his pinnace on to the Calcutta dockside. As befitted a new Governor-General of Bengal who was also, for the first time in the history of British India, a peer of the realm and Commander-in-Chief, his uniform was dress scarlet. Never mind that it was the same scarlet he had worn five years earlier at Yorktown, Virginia, when his capitulation to Washington and the French General Compte de Rochambeau had sealed the fate of the American war. It was a new day for His Majesty’s Empire in Hindustan, and Calcutta was sweatily festive. Though the monsoon season was over, the town had not dried out. The cottony mist clinging to the surface of the Hooghly river was already heavy with sopping moisture and cadet regiments of mosquitoes, primed to puncture the rosy flesh of the sahibs, were hatching from larvae on the brim-full tanks and ponds. The British affected not to notice either the steamy heat or the buzzing pests. Cornwallis, forty-eight years old, rotund and genial in a militarily correct way, was greeted by music, cheering, bands, flags and boats draped with bunting; he cordially pumped handshakes from senior officers, junior officers, Council Members, senior merchants, junior merchants, surgeons and chaplains; and heard whispered welcomes from ladies in broad-brimmed, flower-bedecked hats. After breakfast at Fort William he was revere
ntly greeted, with stooping bows, by the native bankers, banians, kazis, judges and revenue men without whom, he was given to understand, the government would be a nullity. Everyone seemed so very obliging. Could these same persons, British and babu, truly be the ravening ‘birds of prey and passage’ he had heard Edmund Burke denounce in parliament in December 1783, the vultures whose wings he had come to clip?
