Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  On October 25, 1760, George II, the king of England, woke at six in the morning as usual, drank a cup of chocolate, as usual, then went to the toilet. A moment later his valet de chambre heard a strange noise, rushed into the “little closet” and found him on the floor. The king was dead. His twenty-two-year-old grandson ascended to the throne. Where the old king had been vain, loud and a vigorous womanizer, the new George was soft-spoken and pious. Yet he was every bit as determined to wield power.

  George Sackville’s universal public humiliation had been tied to the fractious relationship between the king and the Prince of Wales. He had openly sided with the prince, to the extent that the ruin of his career—his battlefield inaction at Minden—may have been derived from that loyalty. As soon as the prince took the throne, Sackville, in his headstrong way, reasoned that the no-doubt-grateful monarch would be ready to reward his loyalty, that the time was ripe for his rehabilitation. On the occasion of George III’s first public reception, there was an audible gasp as people recognized the “coward of Minden” in the room; George Sackville triumphantly and obliviously processed to the throne and kissed the king’s hand.

  It was classic Sackville, his innate tendency to charge ahead, rendering him oblivious to political niceties. The old king had been much loved, and Sackville’s long and very public court-martial, the widespread belief that he had betrayed England, was still in people’s minds. Association with him was the last thing the new monarch needed as he was trying to win the country over. Sackville was formally advised not to show himself at court again.

  He retreated back to Knole. There, for a time, he was happy, with his wife and family, in the endless halls where he had grown up. He kept a leisurely but mathematically regular routine, starting with breakfast from nine-thirty to eleven, followed by a tour of his grounds on horseback, chatting with his laborers, noting when their cottages needed repairs and seeing that they were done, allowing their children to open gates for him in exchange for sixpence. He had been born into the quasi-feudal manor system, and he believed wholeheartedly in its notions of hierarchy and obligation.

  The household bustled, and he played his part. When his wife went into labor, he actually participated (in some fashion) in the birth of his third child, telling a friend afterward, “I pretend now to some knowledge of midwifery,” and jokingly offering his services as consultant to the man’s wife. He coddled his newborn daughter Elizabeth, listened to his wife prattle to her in French and was pleased with the “uproar” the baby brought to the house.

  But he couldn’t hold back forever. In 1763 he tried again to reenter public life, this time by appealing to John Stuart, aka Lord Bute, the prime minister and close confidant of the king. When Bute told him the time was not yet right for his return, Sackville again pushed back in his overly aggressive manner, threatening that if the king would not welcome him back he would consider joining the opposition. Sackville knew that Bute was hugely unpopular: he was in effect threatening to bring the government down. Bute was disgusted, but the risky gambit may have worked. At any rate, the king and his prime minister appreciated Sackville’s blunt energy and firm intelligence and wanted him in the government. But they had to check the very aggression they valued. The king told Bute to make Sackville wait just a bit more, until the memory of his infamy had faded, at which time “offices might be open to him that would lead to higher ones, and then what appeared dangerous now would become easy and indeed palatable.”

  Later that year Sackville was quietly invited to pay his respects to the king. A few newspapers squawked, but the fuss was manageable. He took the next step: he began asserting himself in the House of Commons, where he still had his seat. Momentous issues were afoot, and he was keen to weigh in on them.

  The matters went to the very heart of the British system of government. A debate that had simmered for decades was suddenly boiling over. The furor was caused by a fellow member of the House named John Wilkes. Wilkes was from London but had been educated at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he had imbibed a philosophy of radical republicanism and religious tolerance. He thrived on controversy, was confoundingly ugly—with a skull shaped like an arrowhead, a severe squint and bad teeth—yet, thanks to a magnetic wit, managed to be a notorious ladies’ man. (He liked to say that given half an hour he could “talk his face away.”) Wilkes was now giving full-throated expression to things that many Britons would only speak of quietly. Eighty years earlier, in 1688, the so-called Glorious Revolution had supposedly ushered in a new era, in which Parliament would take precedence over the monarchy. In 1689, Parliament had enacted a bill of rights that limited the powers of the monarch and enshrined the rights and freedoms of individual English subjects. That was to be the beginning of a truly republican England, one that followed ideas developed by men like John Locke, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, all of whom charted the widening terrain of individual freedom.

  But instead the clock had seemingly moved into reverse in the eighteenth century, as the Hanoverian kings (Georges I, II and III) manipulated the judicial system, raised taxes over the heads of members of Parliament, installed a standing army without parliamentary approval and in other ways assumed near-absolute power. Droves of ordinary people were frustrated by the royal overreach, but no prominent politician dared take up the matter, in part because the political leadership was dominated by aristocrats and the aristocracy’s power was tied to that of the king. Now John Wilkes chose to voice that popular anger, in print and in the House of Commons. Understanding the nature of the problem, he attacked not only the king but the aristocracy. And he did it for what he called “the cause of freedom.”

  George Sackville reemerged on the political scene in 1763, just as Wilkes was bringing his attacks to a new level by publishing an article excoriating the government and declaring that George III had reduced the monarchy to “prostitution.” People in the streets thrilled with nervous excitement; the king ordered Wilkes imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was arrested on a general warrant, a sweeping order that did not name him but applied to all those associated with the publication of the offending material.

  Wilkes, a natural showman, turned his trial into a national spectacle. Speaking in his defense at Westminster Hall, the center of the English legal system since the time of the Magna Carta, he argued in favor of a right to free speech. He peppered his speech with appeals to “English liberty,” and declaimed that the liberty “of all the middling and inferior class of people, who stand most in need of protection, is, in my case, this day to be finally decided.” He argued that a general warrant was unconstitutional, declaring that “the liberty of an English subject is not to be sported away with impunity, in this cruel and despotic manner.” He won his case, promptly countersued the government and won 1,000 pounds in damages. Other people who had been arrested as part of the general warrant also won their cases, and the victory was seen as a major shift toward individual liberty in the British system. Wilkes was lionized in newspapers and church pulpits.

  The Wilkes affair carried across the Atlantic and hit the shores of the American colonies. In many ways, the concerns of Americans—that they were denied certain basic rights that the British Constitution guaranteed—were the same as those of ordinary English, Scottish and Irish subjects. The outcome of Wilkes’ trial gave hope. If the system could be adjusted, so that Parliament was able to check the monarchy, that would translate into more freedom for ordinary British subjects, whether they were in Britain or America.

  George Sackville’s position on these matters was clear. He detested John Wilkes personally (and Wilkes returned the favor, bringing up Minden whenever he could), and as to Wilkes’s victory in court and his championing of “liberty,” Sackville thought it amounted to so much hot air, noting drily that “the Juries of London show their disposition to favour the name at the expense of real liberty.”

  But there was another issue beneath the gauzy talk of liberty that concerned Sackville more. What had got
ten Wilkes riled up in the first place was the peace treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War. Britain had won the war, and now British leaders had to deal with its consequences. Chief among these was a banking collapse in Amsterdam, where much of the debt to finance the war had been held. The financial crisis spread across Europe, causing credit to dry up and leaving British merchants in a panic.

  One way out of the financial crisis was to make America more profitable. France had relinquished control of a huge portion of the continent, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. That land was waiting to be developed and made profitable. Sackville and his colleagues knew they couldn’t entrust its settlement to the existing colonies. For years they had watched as the leaders of the various colonies fought each other like dogs over matters large and small. The British government had to come up with a plan. The disastrous series of attacks known collectively as Pontiac’s War showed that the plan had to include establishing permanent boundaries with the Indian tribes. And there would have to be an extended British military presence to keep peace and to ensure that the French did not try to reassert themselves. But keeping a permanent army in North America would cost money. The treasury was spent from the war, and the home population was already heavily taxed. What was to be done?

  As Sackville was busy politicking on his own behalf (dinner with the Duke of Bedford, having Lord Middlesex to Knole for a relaxing week in the country) in a calculated effort to lift himself back into a position of prominence, a possible solution to the American question arrived in the form of a letter to Prime Minister Bute. Robert Dinwiddie, the former royal governor of Virginia, wrote from his retirement in England with some advice. As an investor in the Ohio Company, Dinwiddie had had firsthand experience of Virginia’s leaders and their keen ambition for westward expansion. He believed that desire could be channeled to serve the government’s needs. It was true that the colonies had never before been taxed by the home country, and the Americans were clearly a feisty lot, but Dinwiddie was of the opinion that they could be made to see that a tax would be in their interest. The money would be used for their own defense, and they would be the first to benefit from organized westward expansion. He even suggested the method he thought would work best with the colonists: “a Stamp Duty . . . similar to that Duty in Great Britain.”

  Bute’s government fell a short while later, and the new prime minister, George Grenville, asked other leaders their thoughts on the wisdom of taxing the Americans. There was a question of constitutionality. Parliament had the power to legislate affairs in the colonies, but since it did not contain representatives from the colonies, opinions were divided as to whether it could legally impose a tax on them. Americans had long believed that their own colonial assemblies had the sole right to tax them, and until now Parliament had not challenged that belief.

  George Sackville’s feelings on the matter were as firmly etched as his feelings about John Wilkes. The theory that the colonies could not be taxed without representation was, in his words, “a strange doctrine.” England was the home country; Parliament was the master of the colonies; it made the decisions, and this was a matter of financial necessity and common sense. Besides which, the Americans were taxed much less heavily by their colonial legislatures than ordinary Englishmen were by Parliament. They had received the benefit of British military protection. They could now begin to share the cost.

  Prime Minister Grenville was a man of similar temperament. He put forth legislation to impose the first-ever direct tax on the Americans. Following Dinwiddie’s suggestion, he proposed a stamp tax, which would require any printed matter, from newspapers to playing cards, to be produced on paper that had been stamped to show a duty had been paid on it. And no doubt Dinwiddie was right: if the wisdom of the tax was made clear to the Americans, they would go along with it. George Sackville—standing with his soldier’s posture in the House of Commons, delivering speeches with what an observer called “nervous compactness”—supported the bill with all his heart.

  The bride wore a yellow silk gown and purple silk shoes. At five feet tall, she was fourteen inches shorter than the strapping gent at her side. They had met ten months earlier, having sought each other out. She’d heard about George Washington: gallant soldier, fine dancer. He knew that Martha Dandridge Custis was an attractive widow, at twenty-seven only a year older than he was, and who, with the sudden death of her fabulously wealthy first husband, was the possesser of 17,500 acres of choice Virginia farmland and a matching fortune. They had probably arranged their first meeting with a potential marriage in mind; having discovered a mutual attraction, they found no reason to delay. Soon they loved each other and, social advancement aside, wanted each other, and wanted to keep wanting each other: Washington was excited enough after the wedding night that he put in an order with his London agent for four ounces of the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly.

  With his marriage George Washington felt a newfound serenity. The restless striving to be noticed and approved of eased. He had won military fame, and, while his desire for a career in the British army had been thwarted, he was ready to excel in the equally honorable capacity of tobacco planter. Thanks to Martha, he had the resources to do it.

  In fact, he had taken the first step toward that goal even before his marriage. A planter of distinction should also be invested in local politics, so Washington ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. His notable friends and associates, including the Fairfaxes and officers from his regiment, made the rounds on his behalf, beseeching eligible voters (white men who owned at least 100 acres of unimproved or 25 acres of improved land) to support him. They believed they could count on the gentry, but weren’t so sure about ordinary folk. One of Washington’s backers warned him that “there is no relying on the promises of the common herd, the promise is too oft forgot when the Back is turned.”

  As it happened, the renowned militia leader won the election easily. As a burgess, who would take his seat in the oldest elective legislature in the colonies, he now had another badge of honor. When not engaged in political business in Williamsburg, he could devote himself to his tobacco. The goal was not merely to make money. It was to produce the finest, sweetest leaf, which would be the talk of the county, win the admiration of ladies and gentlemen and fetch the highest prices from London merchants. He tried with all his might. He rode the fields, observing and questioning and guiding his slaves and overseers. He toiled under the hot sun on his rolling hillsides, with the wide Potomac sprawling below. (Washington “strips off his coat and labors like a common man,” a visitor remarked.) He spent lavishly. He copied what his neighbors were doing, and he also experimented with new varieties, with different conditions and fertilizers. He drove his slaves—300 who had come with Martha, plus others he bought—in the effort to succeed. Nothing worked. His leaf was acceptable but not top-grade. Time after time, his London business agent, Robert Cary, wrote to report a sale price far below what Washington had expected.

  And yet his honor demanded that he succeed. If he couldn’t do so from the start, he made the perilous decision that he must at least look like a prosperous planter. So he put in waves upon waves of orders to London for the finest accoutrements of highborn living. He bought coaches, linens, lace, crimson velvet breeches, silk hose, kid gloves, the “most fashionable cambric pocket handkerchiefs” by the dozen, hogheads of porter, gallons of rhenish wine, punch bowls, china mugs and, to adorn the rooms of his manor, sculpted busts of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the king of Prussia. He purchased it all on credit.

  Then, in April 1763, four years after his marriage, he had to acknowledge failure. He confessed to a friend that all the outlays had “swallowed up . . . all the money I got by Marriage nay more” and “brought me into debt.”

  Washington’s skill as a farmer, or lack thereof, surely contributed to his failure. But many other Virginia planters were finding it impossible to turn a profit. They too had built up mountains of debt. In fact, they were coming
to the conclusion that the system was rigged. English merchants had the products that a colonial planter needed. English politicians made rules stipulating whose products Americans could buy, the price they had to pay and the terms of credit. And the terms had steadily become more onerous. The merchants and banks in England had not suddenly become greedy; rather, they were caught up in the financial crisis that was sweeping Europe, which was tied to the end of the Seven Years’ War. In raising interest rates and demanding payment of debts, the English creditors were simply passing along some of the misery.

  The Virginians were not inclined to explain away their suffering by looking at it through the prism of global economics. The fault, as they saw it, lay with England and its colonial policies. For the planters, more than their livelihood was at stake. From the time of Washington’s grandfather the hallmark of a Virginia planter was his personal independence: the ability to carve acreage out of raw wilderness, tame it, make it productive, and so make oneself the master of a portion of the continent. This was why a successful planter was so admired and respected. Order and civilization came to Virginia not through decrees of the British government or by the establishment of cities but via such individuals, men of grit and will and power. The truth of this was stitched into George Washington’s being. His goal was the achievement of personal independence, which came about through establishing economic independence. As he became mired in debt, he linked this ideal of personal independence to what he called “a free mind.”