CHAPTER VII

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

When the representatives of George V rendered homage a few years ago at the tomb of the great disloyalist and rebel of a former century, George Washington, the minds of many Americans reverted, with a sense of bewilderment, to the times when another King George was guiding the destinies of the British nation. The fact is that the average American still accepts without qualification or question the partisan justifications of the struggle for independence which have come down from the actual participants in the affair on the American side. These accounts, colored by the emotions and misunderstandings of the times and designed to arouse the colonists to a warlike pitch against the British government, have formed the basis of the treatments in our school textbooks and have served to perpetuate judgments of the American Revolution which no fair-minded historian can accept today. Indeed, many Americans of the present generation who readily admit that there is much to be said for the southern side in the Civil War condemn as unpatriotic any effort to consider the origins of the War for Independence from a standpoint of scientific historical detachment. Fortunately our conception of patriotism is undergoing revision, for Germany has taught us the danger of teaching propaganda in the guise of history; and the teacher and writer of history today is charged with the responsibility of being as scrupulously fair to other nations as to the United States in dealing with the subject matter of American history.

In yet another way the popular understanding of the revolutionary movement is strangely at fault. We are inclined to think of the Revolution as a spontaneous uprising of the whole colonial population without faction or disagreement among them. Nothing could be farther from the truth according to the testimony of the patriots themselves. Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, declared to a committee of Parliament in 1779 that at the outbreak of the war not one-fifth of the people "had independence in view"; and John Adams, who would scarcely be inclined to understate the number of the patriots, gave his opinion that about one-third of the people were opposed to the measures of the Revolution in all its stages. The great problem of the patriot leaders, Adams admitted in after years, was to keep the spirit of protest and revolt burning with equal intensity in the thirteen colonies or, as he said more crisply, to get the thirteen clocks to strike at the same time.

Nor was the American Revolution the sedate and gentlemanly affair that the popular historians have pictured it. Sydney George Fisher is amply justified in charging that since the people who write histories usually belong to the class who take the side of government in a revolution, they "have accordingly tried to describe a revolution in which all scholarly, refined, and conservative persons might have unhesitatingly taken part." The fact is that the American Revolution, as we now know it to have been, is infinitely more interesting and human, and provocative of patriotism, than the make-believe revolution handed down by tradition.

I

The very term "American Revolution" is not without difficulties and its use has led to misconception and confusion. In letter after letter John Adams tried to teach a

headstrong generation some degree of accuracy in the use of an expression of whose meaning they had knowledge only by hearsay. "A history of the first war of the United States is a very different thing from a history of the American Revolution," he wrote in 1815. "... The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced. This revolution and union were gradually forming from the years 1760 to 1776." And to another correspondent he wrote: "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people."

This distinction is not only valid in point of fact but it offers a helpful avenue of approach for a consideration of the circumstances of the nation's birth. If the period from 1760 to 1776 is not viewed merely as the prelude to the American Revolution, the military struggle may frankly be regarded for what it actually was, namely a war to dismember the British empire, an armed attempt to impose the views of the revolutionists upon the British government and a large section of the colonial population at whatever cost to freedom of opinion or the sanctity of life and property. The major emphasis is thus placed upon the clashing of economic interests and the interplay of mutual prejudices, opposing ideals and personal antagonisms—whether in England or America-which made inevitable in 1776 what was unthinkable in 1760.

Without considering here the remote and latent causes of the revolt, a discussion of the American Revolution may profitably begin with the effort of the British government to reorganize the British empire after the Peace of Paris of 1763. Of this empire the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic seaboard had, by virtue of the recent peace, become but a

small part. British statesmen felt the imperative need of correcting the slothful and unsystematic methods of colonial management by which some of the older colonies had been granted more liberal government than that enjoyed by organized territories of the United States today, and under which all the continental American colonies had become neglectful or defiant of ordinary imperial obligations. There was a need that all the outlying British possessions should be more closely integrated for purposes of administration and that the far-flung empire should be defended against the ambitions of England's traditional enemies, France and Spain, as well as against the restlessness of the alien subject populations. The problem which confronted the British government was much more difficult than the questions of colonial organization with which the American government has wrestled since 1898; but the American adventure in imperialism, involving, as it did, the question of whether the Constitution followed the flag, should enable Americans of the present generation to view with sympathy the British experiment of the eighteenth century.

The king's ministers glimpsed too narrowly the task before them. What they regarded as an exercise in the mechanics of legislation was really an innovation in imperial relations that touched the dynamic currents of colonial opinion and colonial economic interest at many vital points. Moreover, their attempt was being made at a time when the colonies were, for the first time in their history, relieved of their most urgent need of British protection by the removal of the French menace from their frontiers. Under the earlier imperial policy of "salutary neglect" the colonies had grown in wealth and political experience, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century they had become accustomed to conduct themselves toward England as substantially equal commonwealths in a federation united by a common mon

arch. For the colonists the new imperial policy involved unaccustomed tax burdens, the loss of trading profits, and limitations of self-government-advantages that were none the less precious because derived from an unwritten and unsanctioned constitution. Fundamentally, the great problem of the decade following the peace of 1763 was the problem of the reconciliation of centralized imperial control with colonial home rule. This, unfortunately, was never clearly perceived by the dominant element on either side, the issue being obscured by a blind officialism on the one hand and by an unillumined particularism on the other.

Perhaps the problem was incapable of solution; but we can see now that the best opportunity for a satisfactory outcome lay in the application to the situation of an enlightened statecraft on the part of Great Britain. To this the posture of political affairs in that country was not well adapted. George III, who had ascended the throne in 1760, was already devoting every political and financial resource in his power to the task of converting the British government from an aristocracy of great Whig families into a personal autocracy. His Parliament and ministers did not seek to reflect the aspirations of the British public and therefore lacked a potent incentive for the formulation of a conciliatory program of colonial subordination. The minority in Parliament represented by Pitt and Burke readily identified the struggle of the colonists to preserve home rule with their own struggle in England against autocratic rule. Pitt was thinking primarily of Englishmen at home when he exclaimed on the occasion of the Stamp Act commotions: "I rejoice that America has resisted." If his counsel had been followed, it is possible that the colonial revolt might have been forestalled by some plan of imperial federation.