An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  Everywhere the fabric of the empire was beginning to unravel, and not only from the army’s point of view. On the frontier, no one could fail to see that the British were losing their grip, as settlers flowing westward threatened to cause the Indian war that Gage and the government in London so wanted to avoid. Elsewhere, in the old colonies from Maine down to Georgia, the process of decay might be less obvious, but it was occurring nonetheless, with the debacle by the Mississippi only one symptom of a far wider malaise.

  By the time the British abandoned Fort Charters, their authority in North America was already fading away irreversibly in one field of activity after another. It had never been very robust to begin with, and now it began to evaporate entirely, in the realm of ideas, in the courts of law, in the meetinghouses of religion, and along the coast. Sometimes the collapse of British power was brutally obvious, as it was on the night of the Boston Tea Party. But often their loss of control took a form so stealthy that the British did not even see it taking place until it had become impossible to prevent. As Benjamin Franklin put it at the time, “a great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.” Because the events in question were occurring on the fringes of their world, the authorities in London sometimes had only the vaguest idea of their significance.6

  Although their senior officials were diligent and conscientious, during the decade before the American Revolution the king and his ministers made little effort to study or to analyze the continent they claimed to rule. Only when they learned of the destruction of the tea did the British begin to see the situation in America as it really was. Even then they hoped that the discontent they had aroused could be confined to New England. It took nearly another year until, at the end of 1774, it became apparent that Massachusetts had risen in outright rebellion, with the rest of the colonies in danger of doing the same. Soon afterward, the government gave the orders that sent the redcoats out to fight the rebels and led to America’s war for independence, a war the British should never have allowed themselves to fight.

  From a British perspective, this book will explain how and why the government in London permitted this tragedy to occur. It will tell the story of the last three years of deepening anger on both sides of the Atlantic, between the evacuation of the wilderness and the affrays at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, not far from Boston, where the revolutionary war began in the spring of 1775. At home in England, it seems that no one kept a final tally of all the casualties their army and navy suffered in the fighting that lay ahead, until the war ended in 1783; but on the British side at least twenty thousand soldiers and sailors lost their lives in America, the West Indies, or at sea, in battle or dying in their own filth from wounds or disease, with rarely a stone to mark the grave of anyone below commissioned rank. Black Watch, Irishmen, and English privates alike, they fought to save an empire whose time had passed: an odd and fragile empire that no one had designed and very few people could claim to understand.7

  Two

  THE OLD REGIME

  This country pretends to be our sovereign.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, WRITING FROM LONDON, JULY 1773

  It was always eccentric, the British Empire on the mainland of America, a system as loose and baggy as many of the British were themselves. And to tell the truth, the old colonial regime never really amounted to an empire at all, in the way that a Russian tsar or Queen Victoria might understand the word. From the time of Jamestown and the Mayflower, almost every colony came into being by means of private enterprise. They were small, experimental ventures in search of profit or in search of God. Each one was a painful exercise in trial and error, with seldom a firm guiding hand from London.

  In the case of the earliest plantations in Virginia, New England, and Barbados, the reason was simply this. Before the English Civil War, the monarchy suffered from a chronic fiscal crisis, so deep that it could not hope to build an empire overseas. Rarely able to turn to Parliament for taxes, for reasons that would fill another book, the first king James could not afford imperial adventures on the far side of the ocean. The same was true of Charles I, his son. Occasionally, the Stuarts had to intervene, as they did in 1624, when they made Virginia a royal colony because the company that ran it was on the brink of failure. Even so, for lack of money they could never rule Massachusetts or the Chesapeake simply by royal decree. For better or worse, the monarchy relied on private citizens to take the risks of settlement and discovery.

  Some of the settlers were Puritans, hoping to find salvation on the beaches of Cape Cod. Others simply wanted land or beaver skins. Sometimes they had motives so mixed that historians will argue forever about exactly what they were; and many went unwillingly, as convicts or indentured servants, shipped out to the west by magistrates or kinfolk eager to be rid of them. By the time the civil war began in 1642, the British in America numbered about fifty thousand, strung out along the coast and in the Caribbean and mostly governing themselves with their own laws and customs. It was a very untidy empire—“extensive and detached,” said Edmund Burke, the Irish orator—but it was loyal, it was productive, and merchants and investors could finance its expansion: three very good reasons for leaving the system as it was.1

  Only once did a Stuart king make a sustained attempt to enforce a rigid system of control. During his brief period on the throne, the Catholic king James II tried to rule his American possessions as though they were a fiefdom of the Crown. After three inconclusive wars against their rivals the Dutch, the British had at least secured the island of Manhattan as their own. To cut a long story short, King James appointed a viceroy, Sir Edmund Andros, to combine New York with New England in what amounted to a royal dictatorship. More than just a footnote in the history books, the episode left bitter memories, especially in Massachusetts, but soon enough it ended. In 1688–89 the Glorious Revolution toppled James from the throne and restored the Protestant succession. In America the old colonial system returned, modified and tightened but still nothing close to despotism.

  After that, with the Stuarts in exile Britain gradually became a more stable place, controlled more efficiently from above and less fanatical about religion. By 1714, when the first king George arrived from Hanover, the state had begun to resemble a modern government, with a standing army, reliable revenues, and a central bank, the Bank of England. For most of the next twenty years the nation was at peace. But even then, when they might have changed the way they ran their empire, the British kept the old privatized model that had seemed to serve so well.

  They took it for granted that the colonies were worthwhile for their timber, their sugar, their tar, and their tobacco or as a means to keep the Spaniards and the French from annexing the Atlantic. But why waste public money on a horde of royal officials when the new Americans, who were Protestant and patriotic, could run their own affairs? Of course there had to be some royal appointees and rules by which each colony had to abide. Every new plantation required royal approval. Each one had a charter or a patent, issued with a dangling seal from Whitehall Palace, setting out the limits of its territory and what could be done inside it. But although they were long and full of legalese, the charters allowed for a wide degree of freedom.

  Each colony had an assembly to make laws and raise local taxes, and each one had its own militia. Besides going to war with each other, only two things were entirely forbidden by the British: the laws Americans passed must never clash with those of England, and the colonies must never harm its economic interests. Otherwise the empire would have served no purpose. Every colony had to obey the Navigation Acts, laws passed in Great Britain between 1651 and 1696 that obliged their commerce to travel on British or colonial ships and pass through British harbors; but other than that they could do as they pleased. To watch over their assemblies, most colonies, including Virginia and Massachusetts, had a royal governor, sent out from England to serve a term in office and to line his pockets if he could. Others had a governor they elected. In two unusual places, Marylan
d and Pennsylvania, the post descended through a family at home in England, the Calverts and the Penns. The system was confusing, but it seemed to work, so long as you were white and Protestant and free.

  And so in the first half of the eighteenth century, control from London was usually quite loose. Except in time of war, the British kept their distance and simply watched America unfold. Left to themselves, the colonies acquired their own momentum and readily gave Great Britain what it had wanted all along: a new and fertile source of wealth from overseas. By the end of the 1740s, perhaps as many as two million people, including the slaves, lived in British North America, and all of them were workers or consumers, with the potential to add value to the empire.

  Every so often the authorities would reckon up the numbers and create a balance sheet for their dominions. The figures were crude and hard to interpret, but nobody could fail to see how rapidly America was growing, not only its population, but also the wealth that it generated on both sides of the pond. Tobacco, rice, indigo, and molasses: all of them flowed back across the sea. In return Great Britain sent the colonies the goods its workshops made. Woolen clothing, clocks, and guns and bullets, steel from Sheffield, furniture from London, and books and ironmongery and silk: off they traveled to America, in quantities ever larger as each decade went by, a rising tide of British trade that paid dividends and wages in the mother country.

  Only one thing was strikingly absent. From the tobacco shipped home from Maryland and Virginia, the king and his Parliament received a splendid stream of revenue by way of the duties levied on British smokers and takers of snuff, but as for the colonists themselves they paid the empire only a tiny quantity of tax. Was this a flaw in the system? Some might say it was, since it cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to protect the shipping lanes with the Royal Navy; but most of the time the issue was regarded as obscure and technical. So long as the ships sailed back and forth and trade with the colonies went on expanding, the empire was functioning as it should. However indirectly, the wealth it created enriched the government as well, as increasing prosperity in England helped the king’s domestic revenues to grow. That was good enough to make the empire well worth having. Like the universe imagined by Sir Isaac Newton, the system ran like clockwork, and all the more smoothly because the Americans seemed to be so loyal.

  Every so often, a statesman at home might have his doubts about that if he succumbed to a fit of zeal and actually read the colonial mail. There he might find some traces of sedition, most obviously in New England. In the 1720s, the working people of Boston had a political leader, Elisha Cooke junior, who invented the party caucus as a way to win elections. Occasionally, after some drinks in the tavern—or so it was said—Cooke would be heard railing about independence; and in the years that followed, a spy from London would have found more examples of the same kind of thing, mostly in Massachusetts but sometimes in the South.

  Old Puritan ideas about rebellion and self-rule always found advocates among Americans who knew their history. At moments when the empire seemed too intrusive, they remembered the authoritarian Edmund Andros, and told each other tales of persecution by the Stuarts. Sometimes they might even follow Cooke’s lead and murmur about discarding their allegiance to the king. Reported back to London, this talk of colonial independence would cause a flutter of alarm, but not for long. The likes of Cooke could usually be written off as mavericks with a taste for rum and discontent. Everyone knew that the Americans were anti-Catholic and mostly Anglo-Saxon: features of their makeup that would keep them friendly and reliable, as they always were in time of war.

  Grumble as they might about the cost, the colonists would always turn out to do their bit against the Spanish or the French. The Americans came out to fight for the same patriotic motives that inspired their kinsmen in the mother country. Best of all, Americans in arms were very good at doing battle, even when their tactics were irregular. The wars they fought ended well, making a profit by way of plunder and more land, and the empire proceeded calmly on its way.

  Or so it seemed to the British authorities, until about halfway through the reign of King George II. At that point, like the oil paintings the British collected, the imperial landscape took on a more subtle mixture of light and shade. In the 1740s, a few officials in Great Britain started to imagine a new kind of colonial system, tighter and more unified. At home Parliament had gradually made itself supreme across the British Isles, doing away with local customs and privileges that appeared to stand in the way of progress. For the sake of efficiency, it seemed to make sense to do the same thing overseas.

  In wartime, the slack old methods in America sometimes hindered the effort to defeat the enemy. Even in peacetime, the colonies occasionally found themselves at loggerheads with London about some local issue where the governor could not see eye to eye with his assembly. These points of disagreement might concern finance, the choice of officials, the Indian frontier, or the colonies’ habit of debasing their currency with a flood of paper money. And so the British began to adjust the system to give the governors more power to make the colonies fall into line.2

  But only very gradually: because, while the king’s ministers wished to be more assertive in America, Parliament remained vague and hesitant about affairs across the ocean. And then, in 1754, another great conflict with France began out in the Ohio valley. By 1756, it had escalated to become a global war that raised new questions about every element of British policy toward the nation’s empire. By the time the Seven Years’ War drew to a close, the future of America had become an urgent question, and reform of the colonial system had come to seem essential. The war had cost a fortune, and in London it was felt that the colonies had to pay their fair share. Fought out in Asia and Germany, as well as in the West and Canada, the war led to the doubling of Great Britain’s national debt. By 1764, it had reached more than £130 million, a colossal sum, greater by a fifth than the annual output of the nation’s economy.

  Even so, the kingdom remained entirely solvent, with little likelihood of fiscal crisis or default. Huge though their borrowings were, the British could always service them, because interest rates were low and much of the national debt was undated, meaning that it never had to be repaid, so long as the government paid the coupons on its bonds. By long experience, His Majesty’s Treasury also knew how to slash the military budget as soon as peace was declared. But although for the time being its finances were sound, the kingdom dared not be complacent. The Treasury had to think about the next war and the burden it might impose, rather than the contest that had just ended in victory.

  During the seven years of fighting, taxes had risen steeply until, at their peak, they consumed about 9 percent of the nation’s income. By twenty-first-century standards this was a small and manageable figure, but in the 1760s—when the laboring classes lived so close to destitution, and nobody believed in big government—taxes could not be permitted to rise any more for fear of unrest in Parliament and on the streets. During the war the duties on beer and wine and gin had climbed to new peaks. When George III went to see a play at Drury Lane, he was heckled from the gallery about the price of ale; and when his ministers tried to put a new tax on cider, the protests that followed were too alarming to ignore.3

  And so, led by George Grenville, the king’s chief minister, the British tried to rearrange their sprawling American empire. The nation had to rebuild its capacity to borrow so that when the time came, it could again defeat the Bourbon powers. In the task of fiscal reconstruction, America must come first, for a very simple reason. While at home the army and the navy were cut to the bone, in the colonies the situation was entirely different. Before the war, the British made do with fewer than a thousand soldiers in America. After it, the first estimates called for ten times as many, to patrol the frontier and keep Quebec from rising in revolt. It would all cost a very large sum of money, and everybody had to make some sacrifice.

  Starting in 1764, Grenville introduced a series of colonial reforms,
which he believed were reasonable and mild. With Parliament fully behind him, he appointed new officials, new judges, and a new customs board, based in Boston, to ensure that the colonies paid every penny they owed in duties on sugar and molasses. Gradually, he introduced new taxes too; and to protect the interests of British creditors, he imposed strict new limits on the issue of paper money.

  From Grenville’s point of view, he really had no choice. At the time, a British statesman had two principal duties: to defend the realm, chiefly with the navy, and to defend the revenue that kept the ships afloat. He never expected Americans to meet the whole of the bill for the expanded military on their shores. Even the most hawkish men in London never dreamed of that. But Grenville wanted the colonies to make some contribution; that was only right and proper. And all the time he had another agenda, so obvious that no one tried to conceal it.

  With their new colonial laws and regulations, Grenville and his colleagues hoped to make America resemble Ireland: a conquered dominion where, although the inhabitants had their own laws and their own peculiar faith, everyone knew where authority ultimately lay. Despite their poverty, the Irish were obliged to pay for the army stationed in their midst: and although this led to frequent wrangling with London, the system remained set in stone. Ever since the Tudors, the last word in any Irish argument had always belonged to Westminster, with a British lord-lieutenant in Dublin to ensure that the country remained subordinate. To leave no room for doubt, in 1720 the British Parliament passed a statute, the Declaratory Act, which made the position absolutely clear. When the need arose, they could make laws for the Irish of whatever kind they chose, and Ireland had to obey.