Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
colonial spokesmen were commonly members of the aristocratic group,
among whom the Tory philosophy was spreading fast. Gentlemen in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston fashioned their manners upon
the polite world of St. James’s and caught the Tory ways in politics
as naturally as the London style in wigs. They associated with the
royal officials, traveled in England, corresponded with members of
Parliament. advised in all matters of colonial policy, and proved
themselves the most shortsighted of counselors. Upon their heads rest
in part the blunders of the ministry. In failing to understand the
native liberalism of America, they not only shared responsibility for
an unwise policy, but they hastened their own destruction. Samuel Adams
could not have played so effectively upon the popular prejudices if
the Hutchinsons and Olivers had not brought the Tory ways into wide
disrepute by their arrogance.
Colonial liberalism, on the other hand, was not so simple and
homogeneous as we long believed. It was rather a somewhat vague
composite of the aspirations of three diverse geographical areas, with
different economic interests, social ways, and political ideals. The
middle and northern coast region, with its mercantile cities, was a
distinct area; the tidewater region from Maryland to Georgia, with its
plantation economy, constituted another; and the indefinite backcountry
beyond the older settlements, stretching from Maine southward along
the Alleghany watershed, constituted a third. The first was dominated
by a merchant group--wholesale importers and exporters--wealthy and
conservative, but with a great majority of the population--small
tradesmen, mechanics and yeomen--far more democratic than the
leaders. The second was controlled by the aristocratic planters,
whose leadership during the crises of the dispute with England was
rejected by an economically strong but socially inferior body of
factors or alien middlemen. The third was composed of thousands of
small freeholders, largely Scotch-Irish and German, who acknowledged
no leadership, were unconsciously democratic in their ways, suspicious
of the seacoast aristocracy, wedded to an agrarian philosophy. The
merchant group was liberal only to the extent that liberalism meant
profit: their commercial relations with England constituted them
the closest tie between the two countries, and their timid love
of established ways made them naturally conservative rather than
revolutionary. The planter group possessed the traditional independence
of English gentlemen: they would tolerate no outside dictation in
matters concerning their own parishes, and their burdensome debts to
English merchants cooled the ardor of their loyalty to Great Britain.
The frontier agrarians, on the other hand, were pronounced liberals by
environment and training to whom English ties were at the strongest
only sentimental. They were republican in temper, and becoming class
conscious during the ten years of debate, they grew rapidly in power
and finally turned America against England. A recent historian has thus
characterized the change of temper which brought these agrarians to the
front as the fighting strength of the republicans:
A new class, formed within a decade, growing rapidly in numbers,
was rising to power. In Pennsylvania, as in a number of other
colonies, it consisted of small farmers in the back country,
Scotch-Irish and German immigrants, reënforced by the voteless
laborers and artisans of Philadelphia or other seaboard cities....
For over a decade this rising democracy had struggled for power
against the little seaboard aristocracy of wealth and accepted
social leadership.... The colonial masses could no longer be
controlled by reverence for the high-born. The Quaker merchants of
Philadelphia, the holders of manors on the Hudson, the tobacco and
rice planters of Virginia and South Carolina, and even the great
merchants, clergy, and professional men of New England, could no
longer rule without question their social inferiors.... Thus, in
1774, came the climax in the struggle between rich and poor, East
and West, those with a vote and those who were voteless, between
privilege and the welfare of the common man. The two classes might
work in harmony or might clash on the question of resistance to
Great Britain, but they were pretty sure to be in opposition on
the issue of individual rights. A merchant ... might welcome the
support of the mechanics and small shopkeepers against a grievous
tax by the British Government, but the price, a right to vote and
to hold office, he was sure to resent, and he grew more and more
alarmed as the pressure became more insistent.[195]
From the imperial point of view there were the soundest reasons why,
following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Parliament should have desired
to set about reorganizing the far-spread British Empire. Within a
few years vast territories had been added to the crown, and if the
scattered parts were to be gathered into a cohesive and powerful whole
there was need of a definite policy of coördination and integration.
The American colonies were only a small part of the total empire, and
it was generally agreed among English statesmen that the old policy of
“salutary neglect” could no longer serve imperial interests. If the
Whig imperialists under the leadership of Pitt had been put in charge
of imperial reconstruction, the outcome very likely would have been
peaceful. But unfortunately for the empire the colonial problem became
embroiled with English domestic politics. The purpose of the King was
to set up a personal autocracy with Tory help, overthrow the rule of
the Whig families, eliminate from the ministry the more intelligent
Old Whig leaders--Pitt, Camden, Barré, Burke, Shelburne--and bring in
a narrow-minded group who held to the obsolete mercantilist theory
of colonial dependency. The immediate outcome was the inauguration
of a policy that ran counter to the economic interests of the three
major colonial regions and aroused the hostility of important colonial
groups. Every successive enactment was a greater blunder, until the
crowning stupidity of the tea monopoly--which used colonial interests
as a pawn in a game of the East India Company--threw the colonial fat
into the fire.
The grievances of the merchants resulting from the regulatory trade
acts were real and serious. However the ministry might justify those
acts before Parliament, their effects were disastrous to substantial
colonial interests, and to American eyes seemed designed to bring
colonial trade into further subjection to English merchants. The
attempt to suppress the widespread practice of smuggling was ill
advised even though logical, for it aroused the consuming public as
well as the middlemen, and gave popular backing to the protests of the
merchants. The total political result was to align against Parliament
the most influential groups in the trading towns--the wealthy importers
and the professional classes--and provided opportunity to the radicals
to spread their propaganda under cover of respectable leadership.
The movement of resistance thus set on foot by the class-conscious
merchants eventually slipped from their control and passed into the
hands of the Sons of Liberty, who drove faster and farther than
conservative business men would willingly follow; yet these latter
soon found themselves coerced by tumultuous forces which they had
unwittingly loosed. In consequence there came a time of divided
counsels, and when independence was finally declared large numbers of
the wealthiest and most dignified merchants turned Loyalist and threw
in their lot with the King. More than two hundred quitted Boston on its
evacuation by General Gage. Others stood apart as neutrals till the
war was over, and then drew together in a compact organization to stem
the tide of post-war agrarianism and assist in setting up a federal
government after their liking.[196]
The grievances of the plantation group were less obvious but none the
less real. Probably more critical than taxation or the debts owed to
English merchants, was the question of the western lands. The Quebec
Act stirred the South as the tea monopoly stirred Boston and New York
and Philadelphia. Involved in that act were certain long accepted
colonial rights of domain, on the strength of which vast speculation
in backcountry lands had been engaged in by English and colonial land
companies and individuals.[197] The question was extraordinarily
complicated, involving the rights of the Indians, the ambition of
the Hudson Bay Company to retain the western wilderness as a vast
fur preserve, the rights of Catholics in the French settlements,
the rights of the imperial treasury to income from the sale of the
lands, the rights of soldiers of the French wars to lands granted by
colonial legislatures, the rights of frontiersmen to free settlement
and exploitation, as well as specific grants to several colonies, in
particular Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia. From this mass
of conflicting interests, all eager to exploit an incalculably rich
domain, little hope of satisfactory solution offered, and a wiser
ministry would have kept hands off. But an ill-considered Parliamentary
enactment cut the knot in a way to arouse the quick and keen resentment
of America. Whatever may be said for the solution, one thing is clear;
it set aside by arbitrary statute cherished rights which Virginian
gentlemen, with their eyes on rich plantations to the West, deeply
resented. It was a matter of vital concern to colonies like Virginia
that they should control their wilderness frontier. The Quebec Act not
only alienated thousands of western colonials, but it provided them
with influential leaders like Washington and Robert Morris. It was more
fuel to the radical bonfire.
In the end the fortunes of the revolutionary movement rested with the
yeomanry, and this yeomanry with its agrarian outlook and republican
sympathies, was in a mood to respond to radical appeal. That the farmer
was induced to take down his squirrel rifle and fight King George was
made possible by a number of irritations--his deep-rooted prejudice
against aristocracy, his instinctive dislike of crown officials, his
inveterate localism that resented alien interference--as well as by
substantial class interests. In every colony the party of incipient
populism had been checked and thwarted by royal officials; and it was
this mass of populistic discontent, seeing itself in danger of being
totally crushed, and its interests ignored, that provided the rank and
file of armed opposition to the King. Already Parliament had brought
acute financial distress to the colonies by forbidding the emission
of bills of credit; and other attacks on popular policies followed.
The strength of the popular opposition to royal programs had lain
heretofore in the legislative control of the purse; by threatening to
withhold salaries, the democratic legislatures had been able to coerce
the royal governor and the judges, and keep them somewhat responsive
to the popular will. To the Tories such coercion was proof that the
democratic claws needed cutting, and one of the purposes of the Stamp
Act was the providing of a fund to pay the royal officials out of the
royal chest. It was a skillful plan, but it overreached itself. Party
alignment had become too sharp, agrarian suspicions had grown too
sensitive, for the plan to succeed. The immediate, fatal result was the
accession of a numerous body of fighting men to the other malcontents.
The American Revolution was one of the first fruits of a shortsighted
imperialism. A generous policy of imperial federation would have