An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  The mob at Griffin’s Wharf were guilty of the same offense when they used force in an attempt to make the Tea Act unworkable. None of the culprits had a private grievance against the East India Company; instead, they were seeking to prevent by force the collection of a tax that had the full authority of the British House of Commons. If violent protests against the Tea Act occurred elsewhere on the coast of America, the rule of law would vanish altogether, and Parliament would be deprived of sovereignty. For this reason the men who destroyed the tea ought to be indicted as traitors, just like the wicked Damaree. Lord Mansfield said as much in a speech in the House of Lords.

  In British eyes, the most flagrant cases of rebellion were those that occurred at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late October 1774. When the Provincial Congress voted to create a new militia, to withhold the provincial taxes, and to pay them into a new fund under its control, it repeated acts of treason performed by the Jacobites. The new militia amounted to an independent army raised unlawfully: its creation was an act of war as English judges defined the word. The vote to divert the colony’s taxes into rebel hands fell into the same category. In Glasgow the Jacobites in 1745 had appointed their own tax collector to take possession of excise duties payable to George II. The army arrested the man in question, and he met his end on the gallows on Kennington Common. Here again the principle was easy to state. Theft of the royal revenue amounted to an attack on the king. By the same token, John Hancock and his comrades were traitors too.

  However, before the British put men and women to death for treason they had to gather the evidence required to satisfy a jury. In the case of the Gaspée raid this could not be done, because no reliable witnesses came forward. The Tea Party posed a similar problem: the men who sacked the ships could not be identified. According to Thurlow, the speeches made at the Old South Meeting House were also treason, and so was the riot against Richard Clarke on November 3, but although the names of the culprits were known, another difficulty arose. The evidence pointing to named individuals came from depositions taken in Boston. Before an English judge could issue warrants for their arrest, he would have to examine the witnesses himself. Thurlow dismissed this as impractical.

  The votes at Cambridge were quite another matter. As the Boston Gazette reported at the time, John Hancock and his colleagues passed the resolutions under their own names. Under oath the secretary of the meeting could be forced to confirm the accuracy of the minutes. That would be enough to secure convictions. In addition, General Gage needed an assurance that he would be within the law if he opened fire on rebels in the field. For this reason Lord North asked Parliament for the formal declaration that a state of rebellion existed in Massachusetts, citing the congressional proceedings as his justification. Once the declaration had reached Boston on the Nautilus, General Gage could march his men to Concord.1

  Appendix Two: The Value of Money in the 1770s

  This book has frequently referred to sums of money in pounds sterling, such as the price of tea, the debts of Alexander Fordyce and the East India Company, or the incomes of the aristocracy. The author wishes it were possible to translate these figures into twenty-first-century equivalents by simply applying a standard multiplier to capture the effect of some 240 years of currency depreciation. Unfortunately, this would be highly misleading. The problem is, first, that prices and wages have risen very unevenly, with rates of inflation that vary widely from one item or one occupation to another, and, second, that the structure of household budgets and the British economy have changed out of all recognition.

  Although economic historians can readily chart yearly movements in the prices of specific commodities, and also plot general trends in wages, no scholar has produced a robust and reliable aggregate consumer price index reaching back to the eighteenth century. Without such an index, it is impossible to produce a single multiplying factor to convey the overall rate of inflation. However, all is not lost. There is another way to give a meaning to sums of money from the period: we can simply give benchmarks that indicate what they meant to Britons at the time. For what follows, it needs to be borne in mind that a pound sterling consisted of twenty shillings, each of which was made up of twelve pennies.

  Starting from the top, the average yearly output of Great Britain’s domestic economy in the 1770s was about £130 million. If we divide that by the population, then output per head was about £17 per annum, roughly equivalent to the annual wage earned by farm workers, whose average weekly income was between six and seven shillings. In practice, wage rates varied widely from region to region, and—if they were lucky—a laboring family of five in a prosperous area could boost its weekly income to £1 or more by putting everyone to work. Even so, the British laboring classes endured a wretched standard of living. In the 1770s, a hearty breakfast for one at a market town’s best inn cost one shilling, a good dinner cost about four shillings, and a pound of even the cheapest smuggled tea cost about two shillings and four pence.

  Moving further up the social scale, outside London a skilled artisan such as a carpenter could probably earn at least twelve shillings a week or roughly £31 a year, but this was still only a tiny fraction of the incomes of the gentry. To live respectably in the capital, with a few dependent relatives and two or three domestic servants, a gentleman needed a minimum annual income of about £300. This was the amount of the pension awarded by George III to Samuel Johnson in 1762 in honor of his dictionary. A senior captain in the Royal Navy was paid £365 a year, and at the Colonial Office John Pownall’s salary came to £1,650, roughly the same as an admiral’s. This was still far less, however, than the £4,000 a year regarded as the minimum acceptable income for a peer of the realm. Ten or a dozen aristocratic families had incomes of more than £20,000. Queen Charlotte received an annual allowance of £50,000, a sum intended to maintain a household superior to that of the wealthiest duke.

  As regards public spending by the central government, in 1773 it was about £11.3 million, or less than 10 percent of the economy, within which the largest items were interest payments on the national debt (£4.5 million), and the budget for the navy (£1.8 million) and the army (£1.6 million). And so when Fordyce vanished after his bank lost £500,000 and the East India Company came close to collapse with debts of £3 million, these were enormous numbers. If we assume that an American corporation became insolvent today with liabilities comparable to the East India Company’s, amounting to about 2.3 percent of the U.S. economy, then its borrowings would come to $380 billion, four times greater than those of General Motors when it declared itself bankrupt in the summer of 2009.

  Sources and Further Reading

  An Empire on the Edge draws upon primary research undertaken by the author in more than twenty manuscript collections and record offices on both sides of the Atlantic, of which six were especially important.

  At the National Archives at Kew in southwest London, the Colonial Office records contain a vast wealth of material from the years 1771–75, of which only a small proportion has been published. A few miles to the east at the Palace of Westminster, the Parliamentary Archives hold the American papers placed before the House of Lords in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party, preserved in rather better condition than those at Kew. At St. Pancras, the British Library makes available not only an important cache of documents created by Thomas Hutchinson but also the East India Company’s files, perhaps the finest single archive collection in the United Kingdom. In Stafford, the county record office holds the papers of Lord Dartmouth, another treasure store, especially valuable for the correspondence that he received and for his affectionate letters to his son.

  In America, the Bancroft Collection in the Forty-Second Street building of the New York Public Library includes the papers of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, essential for anybody trying to follow the unfolding of the revolution in New England. And finally, the Massachusetts Historical Society—the author’s home away from home in the United States—stands guard over such superb assets as
the Harbottle Dorr scrapbooks of contemporary newspapers, annotated by Mr. Dorr, a Boston shopkeeper of the revolutionary era. Since the research for this book was completed, these have been digitized and made available online with funding from the Richard Saltonstall Charitable Foundation.

  The secondary literature relating to the American Revolution is immense. Any list of the best books about its origins is bound to be subjective and open to disagreement. From the point of view of the author of An Empire on the Edge, the ten most useful books are the following, in order of relevance.

  At the top of the roster stands Merrill Jensen’s The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776, first published in 1968 but still the most reliable handbook for following the period’s events. Next comes a much more recent work, Jack P. Greene’s The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, a tour de force, concise and penetrating, that appeared in 2011. In third place, we have a British book, P. J. Marshall’s The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (2005), a wide-ranging analysis of Great Britain’s imperial predicament.

  The fourth item on the list is Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution from 1991, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Wood brilliantly elucidates the cultural divergence between the mother country and its colonies. Number five is T. H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010), whose great merit is excitement. Breen conveys the passion of the uprisings in Massachusetts in 1774, as well as a persuasive understanding of their origins.

  The sixth book is Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War (2000) about the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 and its implications for British North America. After that, we have the sensitive account of British political and military failure in the colonies after Lexington by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America (2013). Number eight is Jeremy Black’s moving but fair-minded biography of George III, published in 2006.

  Written in the most elegant language, the ninth book is Bernard Bailyn’s The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, which has acquired classic status since it appeared in 1974. But the finest account of the 1770s will always be James Boswell’s biography of Dr. Johnson, a book that ranges far beyond the life of its subject. Once upon a time, nobody could claim to be educated without having read it. Today scarcely anyone outside a university opens its pages. Nevertheless Boswell remains, for all his wild emotions, his liquor, and his lechery, the indispensable guide to his era.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ADM Official Papers of the Board of Admiralty at the National Archives, Kew, U.K.

  BFP William B. Willcox et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vols. 19–22 (New Haven, Conn., 1976–82)

  BL British Library, London

  BPL Boston Public Library

  CGG Clarence E. Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775 (New Haven, Conn., 1931–33)

  CG3 Sir John Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third, 1760–1783 (London, 1927–28)

  CO Records of the Colonial Office at the National Archives, Kew, U.K.

  DAR K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Shannon, Ire., 1972–81)

  ESTC English Short Title Catalogue

  IOR India Office Records, in the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections at the British Library, London

  LMA London Metropolitan Archives

  MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

  NAK National Archives, Kew, U.K.

  NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh

  NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

  NYPL New York Public Library

  ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  PDNA R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783 (Millwood, N.Y., 1982–87)

  RIHS Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence

  SCRO Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, U.K.

  WWM Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments (papers of Edmund Burke and Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquess of Rockingham), Sheffield Archives, Sheffield, U.K.

  EPIGRAPH

  1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London, 1999), vol. 2, bk. 5, p. 550.

  PROLOGUE

  One: THE FINEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

  1. Gage to Lord Hillsborough, Nov. 10, 1770, in CGG, vol. 1, p. 278.

  2. The British in the Illinois country: Gage’s dispatches to Whitehall between 1764 and 1771, in CGG, vol. 1, esp. pp. 31–32, 65–67, 121–23, and his Nov. 1770 discussion of western policy, pp. 274–81.

  3. For “the finest Country in the known World,” see J. H. Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans: The Story of the French in America, Fort de Chartres (Belleville, Ill., 1929), p. 430. Fort de Chartres: Edward B. Jelks, Carl J. Ekberg, and Terrance J. Martin, Excavations at the Laurens Site, Studies in Illinois Archaeology 5 (Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989), pp. 7–20; and David Keene, “Fort de Chartres: Archaeology in the Illinois Country,” in French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, ed. John A. Walthall (Chicago, 1991), pp. 29–41. British accounts: Clarence W. Alvord and Clarence E. Carter, The New Régime, 1765–1767 (Springfield, Ill., 1916), pp. 177, 297–99. “Your excellency knows”: Lieutenant Colonel Wilkins to Gage, Sept. 13, 1768, D(W) 1778/II, 302, Dartmouth Papers, SCRO.

  4. “We Carried out in a Cart”: Schlarman, From Quebec to New Orleans, p. 432. Indian affairs: CGG, vol. 1, pp. 237–39, 244–45; and Add. MS 21,687, fols. 120–23, and Add. MS 21,730, fols. 27–29, Haldimand Papers, BL.

  5. Withdrawal from the Illinois country: Gage to Hillsborough, Sept. 3 and Oct. 1, 1771, in CGG, vol. 1, pp. 307–12, and Hillsborough to Gage, Dec. 4, 1771, in CGG, vol. 2, pp. 136–38. Abandonment of forts: Gage to Hillsborough, June 4, 1771, in CGG, vol. 1, pp. 299–301; and John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), pp. 330–31. Ruinous state of Castle William: Colonel Montresor’s report, Aug. 31, 1772, Add. MS 21,687, fols. 124–25, Haldimand Papers, BL.

  6. From Franklin’s satirical article “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” Public Advertiser, Sept. 11, 1773.

  7. Although every regiment in the British army kept muster rolls that recorded the names of dead soldiers, it seems that the government in London rarely collated them to give aggregate numbers of casualties. Indeed, it appears that only one official estimate survives, dated January 1781, in a document prepared by the War Office for the Treasury. It gives figures of 5,893 British deaths on active service in North America between 1774 and the end of 1779, and 3,795 deaths in the West Indies between 1774 and the end of 1780. If these numbers are grossed up to allow for two more years of fighting on the mainland and for further losses in the Caribbean, with (say) 500 more deaths in North America after the surrender at Yorktown, we can arrive at an estimate of about 14,250 deaths in the army. For lack of reliable data, this number excludes deaths from disease among British prisoners in American hands, among women and children who traveled with the redcoats, and among American Loyalists or German soldiers fighting alongside the British. On the face of it figures for the navy are easier to come by, with official records showing 1,243 deaths in action and 18,545 from disease in the years 1776 to 1780; but these numbers include casualties in Europe and Asia and mortality that might have occurred in peacetime. Overall, it seems reasonable to say that the American war cost the British armed forces at least 20,000 dead, and possibly considerably more. For the evidence and some commentary: An Account of the Men Lost & Disabled … from 1st November 1774, at BL, Add Ms. 38,375 (Liverpool Papers, vol. 186), fols. 74–75; Christopher Lloyd and Jack S. Coulter, Medicine and the Navy (Edinburgh, 1961), vol. 3, pp. 131–37; and Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the American War of Independence (Oxford, 2000), pp. 26�
��27.

  Two: THE OLD REGIME

  1. Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, March 22, 1775, in PDNA, vol. 5, p. 608.

  2. British colonial policy after 1740: Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, U.K., 2011), pp. 28–35; and Jeremy Black, Crisis of Empire: Britain and America in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2008), pp. 51–68.

  3. British public finance: House of Commons, Accounts Relating to the Public Income and Expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland, Parliamentary Papers, sess. 1868–69, vol. 35, pt. 1, pp. 122–93, 288–325, and (for the National Debt) pt. 2, pp. 302–5; and Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review 41, no. 1 (Feb. 1988). Every writer about British politics in the eighteenth century also owes a special debt to John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1989).

  4. Royal officials: “A List of the Civil Establishment in Virginia,” in a dispatch from Governor Dunmore, March 18, 1774, CO5/1352, fols. 14–15, NAK.

  5. Edward Gibbon, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 513–14. For “the law of nations” and Gibbon on European politics, see his Mémoire justificatif written in French in 1778 to defend Britain’s sovereignty in America, in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, ed. John, Lord Sheffield (London, 1814), vol. 5, pp. 1–3, 25.