AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Western Colonialism)

All real revolutions, from England in the 1640s to Iran in the 1970s, destroy one set of human arrangements and create another. Such revolutionary leaders as Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) in England, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in America, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) in France, Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) in South America, V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) in Russia, Mao Zedong (1893-1976) in China, Fidel Castro (b. 1926) in Cuba, and the Ayatollah Khomeini (1900-1989) in Iran would have understood one another, whatever their differences. All these men’s revolutions transformed their societies. None created heaven on earth.

Yet the American Revolution seems problematic. Was it about equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? How, then, to explain the ”drivers of Negroes” among its leaders and the spread of slavery across their American republic? Was it radically transforming, even though it started from an urge to conserve? Was the transformation it wrought within Americans’ minds, or in how they lived with one another? Was the revolution a national liberation, ”one people” separating ”the political bonds that have connected them with another,” as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence? Until independence, most white Americans regarded themselves as British and the driving issue had been no more than the terms on which they were to be treated as British subjects. Even war did not change that question at first.

Unquestionably the revolution was anticolonial. Alexander Hamilton (1755/57-1804) caught that dimension perfectly in the eleventh Federalist paper (1787). ”Europe,” he wrote, ”by force and by fraud” had ”extended her dominion over. . . . Africa, Asia, and America” and ”consider[ed] the rest of mankind as created for her benefit.” But even this dimension is problematic. Hamilton’s prescription was not general liberation. It was that his own people should ”aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs.”

George Washington (1732-1799) already had congratulated those people on having made themselves ”lords” of their own ”mighty empire.” He and his successors declined to assist Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), Simon Bolivar, and Jose de San Martin (1778-1850) in their efforts to liberate Spanish America from colonial rule. These early American leaders also shunned independent Haiti. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) asserted United States primacy in Western Hemisphere affairs, and the United States went on to seize one-third of Mexico.

What difference did the American Revolution make to the colonial world? That question is best approached around two dimensions. One dimension is space, the whole territory that one Treaty of Paris defined as British in 1763 and another Treaty of Paris redefined as American two decades later. That territory stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and from the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Basin to Florida. Native people, the progeny of white settlers, and slaves all dwelled within it. The second dimension is the terms on which those people ”belonged,” first to Britain and then to America.

Two themes, liberty and subjection, had underpinned the American sense of British belonging. British liberty had meant not equal rights but rather an uneven tissue of privileges and immunities that went with the kind of person one was, and with the community to which one belonged. Some Britons had the suffrage in parliamentary or colonial elections. Some communities, including counties, boroughs, manors, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the College of William and Mary, had their own representatives in Parliament or the local assembly. Britons in America also had the privilege, or liberty, of owning slaves. Britons at home did not. All were subject to the king-in-Parliament. George III (1738-1820) was not an absolute ruler. But together with the House of Lords and the House of Commons he could make laws to bind all Britons, including colonials, ”in all cases whatsoever.” So said Parliament in 1766. Moreover, the king’s protection and laws covered all, from the Prince of Wales to the meanest person, at least in theory.

White colonials had accepted that London could run their external affairs. Parliament set the terms of their commerce with Britain, with one another, and with the non-British world. The king appointed colonial officials and could veto colonial laws, all for the sake of fostering British wealth and keeping that wealth within British boundaries. The colonies prospered. By 1770 one-third of the British merchant fleet had been built in colonial shipyards, and one-seventh of the world’s iron came from American smelters. White colonials believed they were fully British, without much questioning or doubt.

Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man. This copy of a 1774 mezzotint attributed to Philip Dawe illustrated what the British saw as the unruly behavior of American colonists. It depicts Bostonians forcing tea down the throat of John Malcolm, a customs official who has been tarred and feathered, with the liberty tree and the Boston tea party in the background.

Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man. This copy of a 1774 mezzotint attributed to Philip Dawe illustrated what the British saw as the unruly behavior of American colonists. It depicts Bostonians forcing tea down the throat of John Malcolm, a customs official who has been tarred and feathered, with the liberty tree and the Boston tea party in the background.

Yet inequalities abounded. North American colonials could not, for example, refine their iron beyond its crudest stage, so that British metallurgy could flourish. The needs of West Indies sugar planters counted more than those of North American refiners and distillers, so there were severe taxes on non-British sugar and molasses. The king wanted revenue without worrying about Parliament; taxes on Chesapeake tobacco provided it. By the mid-eighteenth century, some colonials, such as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), were praising North America’s rising glory, seeing no contrast with British glory as a whole. But London officials were beginning to see a rival, particularly in the mostly free-labor, non-plantation colonies of the North.

Native Americans gave London more worry. White colonials wanted Indian land, but the Indians were strong enough to resist, both by playing the imperial game and, if necessary, by outright war. Indians were important in defeating France during the long struggle for North American mastery. But when the French withdrew in 1763, native people set out to drive Europeans back from the Great Lakes country. The brief war called Pontiac’s Rebellion failed, and British posts remained at Niagara, Fort Pitt, and Detroit. But Britain did proclaim that colonial expansion had to stop, which infuriated colonial speculators. In 1774 Britain decreed that its appointed government in conquered Quebec would have jurisdiction over the Ohio Country. In effect, the Indians had forced their own terms of belonging on the British.

Underpinning all disputes were issues about the very nature of the British Empire. Metropolitan Britons were moving toward the idea of a unitary state, in which colonials were subordinate and their institutions were mere conveniences, like local councils ”at home.” But to colonials, their assemblies were local parliaments, existing by right and beyond the British Parliament’s control. Pressed on the matter, they would have seen the monarchy not as unitary but rather as composite, with the monarch ruling each province on its own terms, much as James I (of England, r. 1603-1625) and VI (of Scotland, r. 1567-1603) and his successors had ruled over two separate kingdoms until the Act of Union in 1707. Indians would have agreed. They were allies, not subjects at all.

But London was determined to rule. Its attempts between 1764 and 1773 to tax the colonists for the sake of their own defense and administration provoked massive protest. Britain’s attempts to regulate Indian affairs for the sake of frontier peace provoked resentment all around. The problem of slavery was emerging too, in no simple way. Certain that their slaves could reproduce themselves, Virginia planters tried to cut off the obnoxious trade to Africa, only to meet a royal veto. Jefferson made that a grievance in his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet ”Somerset’s Case” (1771-1772) seemed to put the highest British authorities on the side of liberty, at least within Britain, as slaves in America learned. In his decision, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield described slavery as ”so odius” that only a positive law could enact it. Britain had no such positive law of slavery. Mansfield’s decision acquired an exaggerated reputation as having abolished slavery within England. It did not actually do so, but it did mean that slave owners could not forcibly export the slaves elsewhere, as James Somerset’s owner had tried to do. When the Earl of Dunmore (John Murray, 1730-1809), governor of colonial Virginia, and British general Henry Clinton (1730-1795) offered the king’s freedom to slaves ”pertaining to rebels,” they rallied. But others found their freedom on the American side. The issue of slavery was thus brought alive, but it did not fit with the principal concerns of those who led the rebellion against Britain, nor with their notions of liberty.

By July 1776, enough white colonials agreed on independence to make it politically necessary and militarily possible. Severing the tie to Britain raised the problem of organizing a new order. Americans would be republican; that was clear. Whether they would be a single nation or fourteen linked republics (counting Vermont, which broke free of New York) was less certain.

Not the least of their problems was the complex overlay of lines that rendered colonial-era maps exercises in confusion. Virginia went a long way toward resolving that problem in 1781, by ceding a claim that had included most of what now is the Midwest. Two years later, the peace treaty ceded all British claims south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River. As a result, the emerging United States was rich with land, if it actually could establish control over the land.

Decolonization meant a transfer of sovereignty, and one aspect of sovereignty was the exclusive right to deal with aboriginal people. Even before independence, the Continental Congress and the separate states were jockeying for the right to acquire Indian land. As a consequence, both Congress and the states established colonial relations of their own with Indians who supposedly belonged to them. Not until the implementation of the Constitution of the United States in March 1789 was the matter resolved in Congress’s favor. In each case, the goal was to acquire as much Indian land as possible and transform its meaning and use.

Congress established a lasting pattern with its three ”Northwest Ordinances.” Two, in 1784 and 1787, worked out a new system of white colonies, to be called territories and having the right to advance to full statehood and membership in the Union. In that way Congress solved the problem of inequality between the thirteen colonies and their distant metropolis on which the British Empire had foundered. The Ordinance of 1785 established the land grid that is visible on any flight over the Midwest. What had been Indian country would be divided into perfect squares. Sales of the land would bring revenue. Grants would pay off former soldiers. Separate ownership would foster civic individualism. Easy sale would allow owners to cash in capital gains. Indians would be forced to retreat, and retreat again.

In large terms that is precisely what happened, and in large terms the political and economic transformation of western land underpinned the emergence of the United States as a capitalist society. In the long run, the change pointed toward the breakup of family patriarchy and stable communities. The final result was the Homestead Act of 1862, which made public land available for free, to women and men alike. But until the Civil War (1861-1865), land south of the Ohio River was available to slave owners.

The attempt of the Cherokees to establish a quasi-independent republic failed in the face of determination by the state of Georgia and President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) that all Indians had to go and all Indian land had to be open for development. North of the Ohio River, Jefferson’s vision of an ”empire of [white] freedom” did approach reality. But below the river the ”Cotton Kingdom” took shape. To the extent that the fusion of slavery, racist thought, and plantation economics was a legacy of the colonial era, the South remained colonial. Yet both developments were direct consequences of the Revolution. Resolving that contradiction would require a second revolution, far more bloody than the first. But the destruction of slavery was no greater a transformation than the changes that the earlier revolution had set in motion.

At the point of independence the new states were half-formed, ill-defined societies hugging the seaboard. Fifty years later, the United States claimed sovereign rights as far as the Pacific Ocean and exercised real control well beyond the Mississippi. There had not been a single bank in America at independence; by 1826 a full if ramshackle financial system existed, able to control the disposition of both foreign and domestic capital. New York State’s Erie Canal crossed what had been the land of the Six Iroquois Nations, linking the Great Lakes directly and easily to New York City. Other states were planning to emulate the Erie’s success, not only with canals but with good highways and railroads. After a shaky start, a factory system was flourishing between Maine and Delaware, creating two new social classes, industrialists and workers. In a very real way, the United States had succeeded at forming a metropolitan society in its own right. Its white male political society was reaching the stage that the contemporary French observer Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) would describe and analyze as ”Democracy in America.”

Yet as with all revolutions, independence had produced as many problems as it had resolved. A blanket American liberty, supposedly evenly spread, had replaced the patchwork of British liberties. Equal citizenship had replaced uneven subjection as the dominant political metaphor, but the citizenship of slaves was nil and that of free black people and white women remained unequal. Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835) would shortly define tribal Indians as ”domestic dependent nations,” possessed of rights, but not of the right to seek redress in the federal courts, with consequences that still remain unresolved. The revolution had been real, as Washington Irving’s (1783-1859) fictional Rip Van Winkle found when he awoke from his long sleep into a world that he did not recognize. But no more than any other had the American Revolution succeeding in creating a perfect society.

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