An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  That was the way things were in theory. But even in Ireland, so close and yet so distant, the British could not crack the whip and expect to be obeyed without dissent. In every decade, Irish writers kept up a barrage of complaint about unfairness from Great Britain, inspired by the brilliant example of Jonathan Swift. Time and again after 1760, the Irish rose in small rebellions, sometimes with a pike or with a gun and sometimes peacefully in their own assembly by the Liffey, where, although no Catholic could take a seat, the spirit of opposition survived. Every few years, the Irish House of Commons would rattle the bars of its cage to delay some unwelcome initiative from London or to demand the economic concessions they so badly needed. In America, where the colonists watched Ireland attentively because its situation had a likeness to their own, protest and resistance of the same kind had a much greater chance of success.

  On the western side of the Atlantic, the British scarcely had a whip to crack. In the towns along the coast, George III could call upon barely a handful of salaried officials, even after Grenville’s reforms. In Virginia, the largest colony, besides the customs service only seventeen men held office from the king. Massachusetts had even fewer royal servants, to the dismay of conservatives who knew how easily a latter day Elisha Cooke could outflank them. Here and elsewhere in America the British authorities could only do what Americans allowed. Like the Irish, but more effectively, the colonial assemblies caused no end of trouble. Filled with lawyers and fired up by the press, armed with local precedent and local knowledge, they threw dust in the eyes of any British governor who tried to call them to order. Before the revolution, the assemblies used these tactics with the utmost ingenuity, not because they wanted to leave the empire, but because they liked it as it had been before George Grenville.4

  From Boston down to Georgia, it was impossible to compel Americans to do anything against their will. The British tried to do so, and that was the problem, since a policy of confrontation simply could not work. How could it, at a distance of three thousand miles, without a far larger army and many more royal officials? And each time compulsion failed, the colonies became still harder to control. Time and again, the British made empty gestures of authority, which only served to antagonize American opinion. At best, the British would appear to be aloof and incompetent, while at worst they could be portrayed as enemies of freedom as devious as any Stuart king.

  And so, like the army’s plan to hold the Mississippi, Grenville’s project of colonial reform was doomed to failure. In 1765, the House of Commons passed his notorious Stamp Act. His boldest attempt to tax Americans directly, with a levy on legal papers and other documents, it gave rise to a storm of opposition. There were riots, most severe in Boston, New York, and Rhode Island. Up and down the coast the colonies imposed a boycott on imports from Great Britain, and on both sides of the ocean the newspapers prophesied the empire’s imminent demise.

  By the end of the year, Grenville had fallen from power after a personal quarrel with the king. George III never liked his chief minister, who treated His Majesty like a schoolboy who had failed to do his homework. A new administration took office, the Whigs, led by the Marquess of Rockingham, a party of aristocrats who saw themselves as the natural leaders of the nation. With what they thought were the best of intentions, they tried to correct what they saw as Grenville’s mistakes, but they swiftly made an error of their own.

  Alarmed by unrest in the colonies and the effect it might have on the economy at home, the Rockingham Whigs abolished the stamp tax. To do so, they needed to win debates in Parliament, where victory was far from guaranteed among lawmakers reluctant to give in to colonial blackmail. Everyone knew the American slogan: “No taxation without representation.” Abolish the stamp tax, and you would admit that the Americans were justified in saying that a Parliament they did not elect had no right to tax them. To save face and win the vote for repeal, the Whigs were compelled to pass another law, a declaratory act for the colonies, modeled on the Irish law of 1720.

  Passed early in 1766, the Declaratory Act insisted that Parliament remained entirely sovereign in every corner of North America. While the stamp tax had gone, the principle survived that Great Britain reigned supreme, with the right to impose other taxes in the future, much as the marquess hoped to avoid that painful necessity. In the eyes of the Whigs, this seemed to be a sensible compromise: repeal the Stamp Act, but make a plain statement of authority. But far from ushering in a new period of harmony, they merely sowed the seeds of new divisions in the future.

  From that moment, a chasm opened up in British politics between two opposing attitudes toward America. On one side stood those parliamentarians who voted to abolish the stamp tax; on the other, their opponents who denounced its repeal as a craven act of surrender. Because Parliament debated colonial affairs only rarely, most of the time this chasm was invisible. Nevertheless, it continued to exist as a permanent feature of the political geography. Sooner or later, those with hawkish views about America would regain the upper hand, and when they did, they might try to revive George Grenville’s program.

  In their turn the Rockingham Whigs fell from office, much to the relief of George III. The king had given his consent to their liberal stance toward America, but only with deep misgivings. Little more than a year later, another British government attempted to lay another round of taxes on the colonies. Known as the Townshend duties, they were levied on a list of articles—paper, lead, paint, glass, and tea—that the Americans imported from England. Again the new taxes aroused a storm of protest and another boycott of trade with the mother country. In the face of what seemed to be anarchy in Boston, Lord Hillsborough sent in the army in the autumn of 1768 to occupy the town and keep whatever peace there was.

  Eighteen months later, in March of 1770 and with the snow still six inches deep, an altercation occurred between a British sentry and a Boston crowd. A guard of redcoats turned out and fired their muskets, leaving five men and boys dying in the slush. However we choose to describe the victims of the Boston massacre—rioters, bystanders, or American patriots—the incident had been a catastrophe. For Boston radicals like Samuel Adams, the spiritual grandson of Elisha Cooke, the massacre became a symbol of tyranny and resistance, to be remembered every year like the Mayflower or the Glorious Revolution. Running scared of a local civil war, the British withdrew the army from the town.

  And so we approach the point at which this book begins. After many years of turmoil in politics at home—where, said Frederick the Great of Prussia, the king of England changed his cabinet as often as his shirts—at last George III had found a loyal servant whom he could trust. The gentleman in question was Lord North, a stalwart of the British Treasury. He took office as prime minister early in 1770, just before the Boston Massacre. And although he admired George Grenville and always voted for his policies, it seemed for a while that North had found a new accommodation with the colonies.

  Looking again at the Townshend duties, he did what appeared to be the pragmatic thing. Because the yield in revenue was always likely to be small, Lord North abolished them, except for the most important, the tax on tea. After that, tempers cooled down in America, or so it seemed. A period of calm began, but it was deceptive and soon broken. On the frontier the British were in full retreat; and in the towns and the farming country near the coast discontent had never really ceased but simply lay dormant, waiting to flare up again when the moment came.

  THE SHIFTING SANDS

  All the time, the same old problem lingered on. In America the British had only a make-believe empire, a loose mosaic made from tiles without a pattern. Assembled piece by piece when opportunities arose and wars were won, the colonies were never laid out with a plan in mind. They never had a despot at the helm, benevolent or otherwise, to conceive a vision of the system as a whole. Instead, the colonial system remained what it had always been, not so much an empire as a league or a confederation, scattered and diverse.

  America consisted of many provinces and se
ctions, each with its local agenda, its local economy, and its cast of characters. Thirteen colonies would eventually rebel, each one was different, and they disagreed about their boundaries, about religion, and internally about who should run their affairs. Seen from Great Britain, each colony seemed to be full of tiresome controversies between rival factions squabbling for power and status. If only there had been a heroic statesman at Westminster, ready first to immerse himself in the details of America, but then to rise above them to produce a wise new program of imperial reform to replace George Grenville’s flawed proposals, a new order might have been created, fiscal and military: but no such hero could be found.

  In the early 1770s, the political elite in London rarely thought about America. That much is clear from the newspapers they bought, which enjoyed a relationship with politicians as intimate then as it is today. Entirely commercial, the British press sought to give its readers what they wanted. And so the papers watched avidly every intrigue in Europe but gave few column inches to the colonies. A dangerous asymmetry came into existence, with the Americans following news from England with fascination, always looking for clues about the government’s thinking, while the British only read about America when a sensation of some kind compelled them to do so. Despite the crisis over the Stamp Act and then the controversy about the Townshend duties, the king and his ministers rarely saw any reason to delve deeply into American affairs. Their eyes were turned elsewhere, to Europe and to Asia as they surveyed a world that filled some observers with optimism, while others saw only danger and uncertainty.

  As the final crisis in America drew near, the optimists in Great Britain found an eloquent spokesman in Edward Gibbon, the historian, a personal friend of Lord North’s: Gibbon would enter the House of Commons himself in 1774 and vote for the harshest sanctions against New England. At the time he was preparing the first volume of his ironic narrative about the fall of Rome. Much of it was skeptical, and some of it was shocking—Gibbon had no time for Christian piety—but the book contained an essay, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,” in which the author wrote a happy tale of progress and prosperity.

  For Gibbon in the comfort of his study, the future held no terrors, and the British Empire would not go the same way as the Roman. Everywhere he looked, the scholar beheld the fruits of wisdom and improvement. He saw them spreading out to every corner of the globe, encompassing the Old World and the New alike. In the arts and in the sciences, in industry, in commerce, and even in diplomacy, Gibbon saw no limit to what humanity could achieve, led by the England of King George III. Above all, he believed in what he called “the law of nations.” While Europe often seemed to be a troubled place, Gibbon had no doubt that ultimately reason would prevail. In every kingdom, and especially his own, he saw enlightened people who shared his belief in peace and moderation. A balance of power had come to exist in which no single European nation held the whip hand. With Britain standing by with its navy on the side of justice and fair play, Gibbon felt a glow of confidence about the years to come. He reached what he called “a pleasing conclusion,” and it was this: “Every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”5

  Here was a brilliant, erudite man, writing from the heart of the elite. In his stately syntax, he conveyed a vision of serenity and hope. But Edward Gibbon was a man of letters, with twenty years of leisure in which to write his book. For Lord North and the British cabinet, practitioners of business and affairs, the future did not seem so promising. In their happier moments they could sympathize with Gibbon’s optimism, and like him they believed that Britain stood for progress. But most of the time their mood was very different, as they surveyed a global scene of lawlessness and strife.

  In the early 1770s, North and his colleagues felt that beneath their feet the ground was shifting, and they could not say how things would end any more than they could chart the currents of the Mississippi. Beyond the English Channel, the king and his ministers had few friends whom they could trust but many enemies and rivals. Everywhere they heard dark voices prophesying war. In Bengal the British had acquired another empire, operated on their behalf by the East India Company, but at best the company’s tactics were dubious, and at worst they were corrupt and self-defeating. Without far-reaching reform of the company’s management, the British cabinet feared that one day India might be lost entirely to hostile maharajas in alliance with the French. And nearer home in Europe they saw only confusion.

  With George III asleep on his throne at the far right, Catherine the Great and her Prussian and Austrian allies carve up the kingdom of Poland between them in this cartoon from 1772 satirizing Britain’s waning influence abroad. Library of Congress

  Far from being stable and secure, the balance of power appeared to be breaking down. France could never be trusted, and neither could the Spanish, while Austria remained a potential foe. To the east the cabinet saw new military nations, the Russians and the Prussians, with expansionist ambitions of their own. In British eyes, the feudal powers beyond the Elbe displayed attitudes to international law that were cynical or even wicked. Another war in Europe might lie just around the corner, and if the British had to intervene again in Germany, the Baltic, or the Mediterranean, the outcome might not be another victory. While at sea the Royal Navy reigned supreme, on land Great Britain could not match the armies of its opponents.*

  At home the situation contained perils of its own. Ireland was rebellious again, this time in its northern province, with farmers in Ulster up in arms against their landlords. In London there were factions, feuds, and riots, fomented, it was thought, by atheists and libertines. Meanwhile, the price of corn was rising steeply, causing alarm in the cabinet as well as among the poor. An economic upheaval had just begun, the long, slow, and complicated process that today we call the Industrial Revolution. Nobody used that term to describe the economic changes that were under way, but they were occurring even so, and North and his colleagues felt their early consequences. In its wake, the birth of modern industry in Great Britain brought vast opportunities, exciting and life enhancing, but it also caused unsettling peaks and troughs in the economy, with periods of misery and trauma.

  Against this background, the politicians in Whitehall had to come to terms with the unrest in the colonies. However dearly they wished to be as confident as Gibbon, they could not rise above the flux of events and take a calm, judicious view of the American crisis. And because the colonies were far away, it was all too easy to forget about them during the intervals when they appeared to be tranquil. Distracted by so many other issues, the British failed to see just how fragile their position was in North America. Inertia took the place of statesmanship until the machinery of empire had corroded beyond salvation. And when at last the Boston Tea Party obliged them to stare directly at the colonies, they did so not with Gibbon’s optimism but with its opposite: a pessimistic vision of anarchy and treason. In the end, their perception of the world as a troubled, lawless place would lead them to the use of force against New England.

  This book will amount to a sympathetic study in failure, seen chiefly from the standpoint of British politicians and the British public, whose minds we have to try to enter. Without taking sides, it will try to explain how and why Great Britain stumbled into the war that began at Lexington. Among the British, there will be two leading characters. One is Lord North, while the other is his friend and kinsman William Legge, Lord Dartmouth, his minister for the colonies. Neither man was dishonest. By the standards of the age they were paragons of virtue, their private lives untainted by a single peccadillo. Far from being unprofessional, Lord North possessed a mastery of politics that few statesmen in his period could equal. But for all his qualities he could not hope to understand the American challenge that lay ahead. As everybody knows, the chain of events that led to war began in an odd or even a comical way, with a quarrel about an item so mundane t
hat almost no one at the time expected it to provoke a revolution.

  The item was tea. When Lord North did away with most of the Townshend duties but left the tax on tea in place, he merely postponed another great collision with the colonies. Levied at threepence on a pound of leaves from China, the tax came to symbolize the British claim to complete supremacy. Sooner or later, the tea tax was bound to cause another crisis as severe as the one that followed the Stamp Act, and this time one that could not be resolved by peaceful means.

  The British East India Company controlled the nation’s trade in tea, but by the summer of 1771 it was approaching a calamity of its own. Loaded down with tea leaves it could not sell, the following year the company came near to bankruptcy. With the connivance of Lord North, eventually it tried to rescue its affairs by shipping the surplus tea to America. Even at the time, a few astute members of Parliament shook their heads, warning about the fury this would cause if the tea still carried the tax; and then, a few months later, the moment of truth occurred in Boston Harbor at the hands of a crew of working men and intellectuals. In December 1773, the people of Boston dumped the company’s tea in the water. Angry and appalled, the British government replied with a package of new laws and penalties designed to teach the colonists a lesson in obedience. By the end of the following year, New England had risen in revolt.

  None of this was accidental, and least of all the role performed by tea. However bizarre it might seem that tea could cause a revolution, the Boston Tea Party took place as a consequence of fundamental flaws in the system that the British had created. The British really had two overlapping empires: not only the official, political empire, with its garrisons and governors, but also a commercial empire, private and informal and financed with debt. While there were a few politicians who simply wanted power, and the more of it the better on a global scale, in the eighteenth century the British took a far more serious interest in money. Profit was the goal of almost everything they did overseas, and so in reality they valued their commercial empire more highly than the flags they had planted on the map.