Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Croghan’s Suffering Traders were a handful of substantial Philadelphia merchants, and their venture would eventually spawn speculative companies with rich, influential shareholders on both sides of the Atlantic. Lyman’s Military Adventurers were much more numerous, poorer, obscurer men, all from New England and many interested in actually settling on the lands they hoped to acquire, not just in selling them for profit. But these otherwise dissimilar groups were alike in that the members of both formed them during hard times, in the hope of improving their fortunes. As Riche had looked to Guiana as a place where risks, boldly undertaken, might produce fabulous rewards, both large and small speculators regarded the newly conquered lands as fields of opportunity that might deliver them from the constraints of a constricted postwar world.

  Such perceptions and responses stretched not only from city to country and from region to region within the colonies, but across the sea as well. Great Britain was in economic straits of its own, in some ways worse ones than the colonies. In 1763 and 1764 streams of migrants were already flowing out of London, the depressed rural areas of the northern English counties, and Scotland, all in search of relief: the first freshets of what over the course of a decade would swell into a flood of British emigration. The willingness of migrants—the better-off families searching for farms to buy, the poorest individuals selling themselves as servants to escape pauperization—to move to North America intersected with the availability of land in the new colonies, making speculative ventures attractive to Britons with good connections and narrowing investment options.15 The war, in effect, had radically contracted the Atlantic world by making America critical to Britain’s welfare, stepping up the pace of interaction between colonies and metropolis, encouraging regularized communication, and stimulating transatlantic commerce. Recession contracted that world in another way as the promise of cheap land encouraged the flow of population westward in the direction of America, and hope.

  The postwar speculative surge could, under the right circumstances, forge links between investors on opposite sides of the water, but the recession increased the likelihood that transatlantic relationships would be competitive, potentially antagonistic, ones. Within North America, hard times tended to make conflicts over contested lands—for example, those in the area between the upper Connecticut Valley and Lake Champlain that both New York and New Hampshire claimed, or those between the Berkshire Hills and the Hudson that New York and Massachusetts disputed—more anxious, and ultimately more ferocious, than ever. Thus if land speculation and frontier settlement were nothing new in British America, the context in which they now occurred altered their character and raised the stakes for the participants. Much more directly than before the war, changes in the metropolitan economy as well as shifts in imperial policy could influence even remote frontier regions in North America.

  Influence, not control: a critical distinction. Vast stretches of the postwar backcountry were simply ungovernable, and as migration to the frontiers increased disorder would only grow worse. This was particularly true in the two Carolinas, although for different reasons in each. In North Carolina the problem grew from an impoverished economy and a chaotic land-distribution system that permitted British land speculators to dominate the real-estate market, inviting petty profiteering by their agents and local officials, and making it difficult for squatters to obtain clear titles to farms they had already improved. Migration into the piedmont during the last years of the war and in the early 1760s brought to the province families attempting to better their circumstances and hoping to escape Indian raids, and soon bred antagonism between the small, insecure, low-country elite and a growing population of backcountry farmers. Finally, while the war had brought high taxes to North Carolina, it had not created prosperity there, as in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England; and the postwar recession rendered this chronically disorderly, poor province less stable than ever.16 In South Carolina, ironically, similar problems arose from the conjunction of much more favorable circumstances.

  South Carolina experienced no significant Indian trouble after the conclusion of the Cherokee War and thus avoided heavy continuing taxation. When the southern European market for rice remained strong and British demand for indigo held steady through the 1760s, the colony became the single shining exception to the rule of depression in British America. In 1763 and 1764 the only significant problem the low-country merchants faced was the surplus of slaves on the local market, a legacy of the last years of the war when low prices had encouraged them to acquire the large inventories that they now had to clothe and feed until prices climbed to profitable levels. One reason for their sanguine outlook had been the “vast number of people setting down upon our frontier lands,” who, the Charleston merchant (and former provincial officer) Henry Laurens believed, would “with a little management . . . take off insensibly a [slave] cargo by one or two in a lot.” As it happened, Laurens and his fellows miscalculated the backcountry settlers’ interest in acquiring slaves. They were right, however, about the boom in backcountry population, which South Carolina’s liberal land-granting policies helped to promote.17

  Laurens understood what was going on in the backcountry because he speculated in land there, a pursuit that set him apart from most other members of the low-country elite. Unlike their counterparts in Virginia, South Carolina’s planter gentry did not promote the development of the frontier. The success of their staple crops of rice and indigo freed them from the necessity of looking sharp for supplementary sources of wealth, and their instinct was to minimize the political influence of the backcountry whenever possible. Virginia’s speculating gentlemen readily created counties and fostered the power of new county leaders (who tended to be their own sons, sons-in-law, and nephews), but South Carolina planters feared that the burgeoning white population of the backwoods would dominate the colonial assembly, and so refused to establish new units of political representation. If this was a politically expedient practice, it was hardly a wise one. As frontier settlements mushroomed in the years following the Cherokee War, the absence of courts in the west became as much a grievance as the increasingly grotesque underrepresentation of the frontier districts in the assembly.

  Already by the end of the war, and increasingly thereafter, the backcountry in both Carolinas was a magnet for all kinds of disorderly elements: debtors in flight from creditors, escaped convicts, military deserters, fugitive slaves, runaway servants, deerskin hunters, and outlaw gangs that settlers with property and families to protect called “banditti.” The coincidence among a lack of county courts, a postwar recession spurring migration in search of opportunity, and the southward movement of refugees from the more dangerous frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia created serious problems of law and order along the whole length of the Carolina backcountry. At first, when the roving thugs whom most propertied, “respectable” frontier settlers would have preferred to see locked up or hanged could neither be arrested (because there was no sheriff) nor prosecuted (because there was no court), they formed posses, held kangaroo courts, and applied vigilante justice. Later, when the low-country elites persisted in ignoring their pleas for county governments, those same respectable backwoods farmers began to organize themselves politically.

  The so-called Regulator movements that would emerge in the second half of the 1760s on the two Carolina frontiers would take different forms, depending on conditions in each province. South Carolina’s Regulators would tend to concentrate on suppressing banditry and seek to develop ties with the low-country elite, while those in North Carolina would assume an antiauthoritarian tone and move toward armed resistance, leading the coastal gentry to identify the Regulators themselves as criminals. In both provinces, however, by 1763–64 pronounced divisions were developing between east and west, low country and backwoods: a pattern of sectional antagonism and mutual suspicion that would strongly mark the politics of the lower south for the next decade and color the response of those provinces to Grenville’s reform prog
ram and all the British measures that would follow it.

  The emerging sectional divisions in the Carolinas were new and unfamiliar, but in other colonies where sectional strains prevailed before the war had muted their expression, old patterns reemerged in the first years of peace, often in robust form. This was the case in Connecticut, where the political fault line split the colony’s poorer, evangelical east from its richer, Old Light and Anglican west; in Rhode Island, where a mercantile faction centered in Newport competed for power with a mercantile-and-farming faction centered in Providence; and in New York, where Albany-based merchants and landed gentry joined farmers from the east end of Long Island (a group largely made up of Presbyterians and other dissenters, collectively called the Livingston Party) to oppose the faction of New York City–centered merchants (largely Anglicans, known as the De Lancey Party) that had controlled the provincial assembly during the war. Only New Jersey, long riven by internal tensions between proprietors and farmers and split between east and west, came out of the war with less sectional division and an elite more united and evidently in control.18 Other colonies’ political alignments were harder to plot on a map, but they generally reflected old patterns, often intensified after a long wartime lull.

  In Maryland and Pennsylvania it was the familiar politics of deadlock. As proprietary colonies, both had developed polarized systems that opposed the interests of the proprietors, who controlled land grants, made executive appointments, and maintained blocs of votes in the assemblies, to those of antiproprietary parties that generally held legislative majorities and battled the proprietors for control. Maryland had virtually sat out the war because its governor could find no common ground with the antiproprietary party that controlled the lower house; now the colony remained locked in intractable conflict over the extent of proprietary powers. Pennsylvania’s paralysis, by comparison, had been intermittent.

  As we have seen, at the war’s beginning the antiproprietary Quaker faction that controlled the assembly resisted the creation of military institutions until Indian and French raids had devastated the province’s frontiers. In 1756 the Quaker grandees had withdrawn from politics, ceding leadership to Benjamin Franklin and others who lacked their pacifist scruples; those new leaders in turn had used the war to beat concessions out of the governor and the Penn family over taxation and related issues. With the return of peace and the outbreak of Indian insurrection, the proprietors moved to seize power in the assembly by allying themselves with westerners and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians against the antiproprietary party, which remained centered in Philadelphia and the eastern counties. This effectively revived Pennsylvania’s furious prewar factionalism, lending it new sectional and religious hues. In 1763 and 1764, as the resurgent proprietary interest gained seats in the assembly, the antiproprietary party mounted an effort to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony. As in 1755 and 1756, the defense of frontier settlements once more took second place to political infighting.19

  Governors elsewhere retained more political control than in Maryland and Pennsylvania, albeit in different degrees and for different reasons. Georgia’s royal governors ruled without effective opposition because the colony was young, militarily feeble, and unusually dependent on Britain. In New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth governed with a hard and grasping hand: his family had fixed its grip so tightly on the province’s resources, trade, government posts, and land-distribution systems that no rival could mount a challenge without having his efforts repaid with political annihilation. Virginia and Massachusetts also had comparatively strong governors capable of evoking cooperation from their assemblies and limiting challenges to royal authority. In both cases, however, the potential for opposition existed in ways unknown in Georgia or New Hampshire.

  Virginia’s gentry, as we have seen, was experiencing significant strain as tobacco declined and debt mounted. Because the elite maintained substantial class solidarity and the House of Burgesses remained unfactionalized, certain kinds of challenges could turn the entire House against the governor. Thus while Governor Fauquier generally enjoyed an admirable record of success in dealing with the Burgesses from 1758 through 1763, their cooperation was never guaranteed. He discovered exactly how conditional his leadership was in January 1764, when he urged the House to appropriate money for frontier defense but refused to allow them to issue paper currency to fund it. With virtual unanimity the legislators refused to comply, forcing him to prorogue them without forts or troops to preserve the backcountry from Indian attack. In Massachusetts, by contrast, Governor Bernard had also enjoyed considerable success in controlling the General Court: not because he could summon the cooperation of a unified elite, but because the elite was factionalized in such a way as to make it more or less manageable. By the careful distribution of limited patronage resources Bernard and his lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, kept up an effective court party in the General Court: the firm (if not unassailable) majority that had withstood the assault of the country party and sustained the prerogative power in the writs of assistance controversy. In early 1764 signs of brittleness in the court party’s majority appeared, but the fact remained that the opposition was far from breaking Hutchinson’s and Bernard’s hold.20

  Throughout the colonies, then, a troubled transition to peace left political life and alignments in flux. Despite their complexity, most of the conditions that prevailed in early 1764—growing sectionalism in the lower south, reversion to prewar patterns of conflict and sharp revivals of factionalism in most other colonies, increasing instability or deadlock in the politics of all except the minor provinces of Georgia, New Jersey, and New Hampshire—derived from the war and its aftermath. The return of peace found the colonies as diverse as ever and, in the absence of a common enemy, diverging once more. Most were responding, according to local conditions and alignments, to what the war had done (increased public debts and raised taxes) and to what the recession was doing (making revenues scarce). In those colonies that had been most heavily engaged in the war effort, a hard-won political stability was vanishing. In New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, war governors had used large defense budgets, parliamentary subsidies, appeals to patriotism, and the expanded patronage resources that the war had provided to build effective court parties. In Pennsylvania the antiproprietary party, a country faction, had in effect used the war to co-opt the governor and dominate provincial politics. In Virginia the governor had employed patriotic arguments and parliamentary reimbursements to gain the cooperation of the entire provincial elite. Everywhere except Maryland, the appeals of governors to the colonists’ instincts for patriotism had minimized public contentiousness from 1758 through 1762. But by 1763 and 1764, things were changing fast.

  A half century earlier in England, Sir Robert Walpole had laid hold of the same elements that helped to stabilize colonial politics during the last half of the Seven Years’ War—patriotism, patronage, and self-interest— and from them had fashioned an engine of “influence” to control Britain’s unstable political system. He succeeded in creating a stable parliamentary regime largely because a funded national debt and standing armed forces allowed him to perpetuate levels of patronage previously possible only in time of war. Once Walpole had that indispensable resource in hand, everything else could be accomplished through the political management (in the language of his opponents, the corruption) at which he excelled. But the colonies in the 1760s offered no possibility of duplicating Walpole’s feat. Colonial public debts could not be funded and made perpetual, but had to be paid off by the retirement of currency issues within stipulated numbers of years. Colonial governments, obligated to continue taxing their citizens at very high levels so long as war debts remained unretired, withdrew money from circulation and deflated colonial economies even as Parliament’s subsidies ended and the worst recession in Anglo-American history strangled colonial commerce. Moreover, unlike Britain’s regular army and Royal Navy, provincial armies were disbanded upon the return of peace, depriving governors of
the commissions and supply contracts that had been the lifeblood of political influence during the war.

  Thus the return of peace, the end of transfer payments from Britain, and the onset of the recession all weakened the ability of governors to suppress opposition and defend the prerogative, at the very moment that provincial tax burdens stood at their highest levels ever. Under these new circumstances, the arguments from patriotism that governors had used to good effect during the war lost resonance. Without an immediate and transcendent common cause to serve, local concerns loomed larger in the minds of colonial assemblymen, and local conditions cried out more loudly than the abstract needs of an empire that was, to all appearances, no longer at risk.