The Glorious Cause Page 2

  Their increase in business and population did not amaze Americans, who had long had great expectations for themselves. To the heirs of people who had begun by thinking of themselves as settling the New World in the service of God, success—increase and growth in the things of this world—seemed only their just deserts, only their due, and a part of the eternal order of things.

  In the second half of the eighteenth century that order still extended to the ordinary doings of life—and especially to work and family. Work seemed akin to the sacred. Work was a duty imposed by God and approved by Him as right and good. That everyone should have a trade or a calling was unquestioned. The trade should be worked at, the calling well followed, for as Franklin said, “there is much to be done” and though you may be “weak handed,” “stick to it steadily and you will see great Effects.”

  To be sure, the higher purposes of these great effects were not so clear as they had once been, say, to the founders of the colonies. But the purpose of life was still the glorification of God. Teaching that proposition fell to all in authority and began with parents, especially fathers, who ruled the house and all in it. They were commissioned by God and their word was law. They were responsible for much—for bread, for discipline, for seeing that others lived up to responsibilities, and for doing so themselves.

  The order that began with the divine and expressed itself in the lives of a people embraced their government. In the second half of the eighteenth century no one in America regarded the Crown as the immediate instrument of God. Yet royal government had the sanction of the Lord, and men accepted the existing structure of government without question, though they often protested against its agents whom they faced every day.

  The structure of government, they agreed, should reflect the structure of society. The good, the well-born, and the socially qualified should govern. That arrangement had apparently always existed and should continue. Maintaining it seemed all the more desirable to Americans because they knew that it conformed to the ancient lines of the British constitution, the most glorious frame of government yet devised by man. The Americans marveled at the long history of the protection—indeed encouragement—that the British constitution afforded to liberty. And it protected imperial liberty, the freedoms of Americans as well as Englishmen, a remarkable achievement when measured against the record of despotism in earlier empires, and the tyranny that infected most of European life.

  This public life and private life, according to these widely shared assumptions, were a part of an inevitable and unchanging order. Yet what American colonials assumed seems to have flown in the face of the reality for which they professed such admiration. For in the New World much was different, and a fresh though not entirely new society was making its appearance. The assumptions about the fixed order also prevailed in England. That agreement between England and America is one of the facts that makes the Revolution so difficult to understand—how it began and what it became—a bloody war between peoples who had long been held together by having so much in common.

  1

  The Obstructed Giant

  When George III acceded to the throne in 1760, his English subjects were singing with spirit once more. “Rule Britannia” burst from their mouths—words twenty years old (they originally formed a patriotic poem)—and they went like this:

  When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

  Arose from out the azure main;

  This was the charter of the land,

  And guardian angels sung this strain

  “Rule Britannia, rule the waves;

  Britons never will be slaves.”

  The call to rule seemed natural in 1760; a few years earlier it had mocked the realities of British power and influence in Asia and America. For in these years of war with France, British arms took a terrible beating—and so did British pride.

  The war had begun with a skirmish in the wilderness between French troops and American colonials led by young George Washington, whose description of the affair revealed that his interest in war lay in the opportunities it offered for honorable and gallant action. Honor and gallantry did not die in the next few years, though large numbers of English, American, and French soldiers and Indians did. The deaths of the English and Americans were especially galling, for they came in a series of battles marred by ineptitude, stupidity, and, some said, cowardice. General Edward Braddock, not stupid but surely inept and ignorant of his ignorance, lost his army and his life a few miles from what is now Pittsburgh. Colonel James Mercer, brave but incompetent, gave way at Oswego on Lake Ontario to General Montcalm, who pushed across Lake Champlain to Lake George and seized Fort William Henry. At sea things had gone no better, as Admiral Byng surrendered Minorca in the Mediterranean to French forces, whereupon the Admiralty charged him with cowardice and when he was found guilty in a court-martial ordered him shot. On the Continent disaster followed disaster. Frederick the Great, Britain’s ally, sent armies against French and Austrian forces and absorbed defeat. The British and Hanoverian army did no better and after defeats in the summer of 1757 virtually surrendered Hanover to the French. In Asia Britain’s prospects appeared dark as the French marched, Calcutta fell, and the entire subcontinent seemed ripe to be plucked by the French.

  Up to this point in the war British leaders had squandered their resources; they had no clear idea of how or where to proceed against the French. They had failed to bring their power to bear, to focus it, and thereby make it bring victories. In 1757 these leaders gave up office, and the old king, George II, called William Pitt to head the new ministry.

  Pitt was one of the marvels of the century, a leader who dazzled sober politicians and the crowd alike. He drew his peculiar appeal from some inner quality of temperament as well as mind, a quality which allowed, indeed drove, him to disregard both conventional wisdom and opposition and to push through to what he wanted. He was an “original” in an age suspicious of the original. He got away with being what he was, scorning the commonplace and the expected and explaining himself in a magnificent oratorical flow that inspired as much as it informed.

  Pitt’s powers of concentration shone from his fierce eyes, as did his belief in himself; in the crisis of war he said, “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.” He was obsessed even more by a vision of English greatness, a vision that fed on hatred of France and contempt for Spain. Pitt had despised the fumbling efforts of his predecessors to cope with the French on the Continent, and he was impatient with the incompetence of English generals in America. Hence he went to different men—Saunders and Boscawen in the Royal Navy, Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe in the army in America—and to fresh strategies in the war. Properly subsidized, Frederick the Great would take care of the French on the Continent. The navy’s task was to prevent resupply of French forces in Canada, and it was in Canada and the West where Pitt ordered that the main effort should be made. Pitt was fascinated by the New World and captivated by the idea that imperial power should be forced to grow through trade in a vast arena under British sway. And so he made the fateful decision to play his strongest hand in America while the French were occupied in Europe and held off on the sea.

  The strategy worked brilliantly. In July 1758 a combined military and naval force under Admiral Boscawen and Generals Amherst and Wolfe took the French fortress of Louisbourg. Soon after, Fort Frontenac, as the site of what is now Kingston, Ontario, fell to Colonel John Bradstreet and his New England volunteers. George Washington felt the exquisite pleasure of serving with General John Forbes as that commander, retracing Braddock’s steps, took Fort Duquesne after the French destroyed and then abandoned it. The British soon renamed Duquesne Pittsburgh to celebrate Pitt’s daring leadership. Pitt got an unexpected series of victories in India from Clive, who set about demolishing French power there with a vigor to match Pitt’s own. And on the Continent, Frederick danced and slashed his way through the encircling armies of France, Russia, and Austria.

  The greatest triu
mphs came the following year—the wonderful year—1759. Admiral Sir Edward Hawke’s naval squadrons smashed a French fleet at Quiberon Bay southeast of Brest and thereby prevented provisioning of Canada with food and troops. In the West Indies, the rich sugar island of Guadeloupe surrendered to a joint expedition of the British army and navy. Two thousand regulars and one thousand Iroquois did their bit at Fort Niagara, which Sir William Johnson, who replaced Brig. General John Prideaux killed in battle, captured in July. But the victory that left all of Europe gasping with admiration—and England swollen with pride—was won by Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. Wolfe died there. So did the romantic Montcalm, and with him French power on the American continent.

  Victories were won the next year, but the war continued as George III took the crown. The new king wanted peace, wanted it so much that he was willing to let Pitt leave office. Pitt, far from wanting peace, urged that the war be widened to include Spain. Pitt made the king uncomfortable: he was too flamboyant, too unpredictable, and there seemed to be a bloodthirsty quality in his daring. And so he had to go from office; he resigned in October 1761, and by the end of the following year terms of peace had been arranged.1

  II

  Most of George’s subjects probably hated to see Pitt depart; he had given them glory and power and excitement. The rest of Europe felt differently. Europeans may have been awed by Pitt but they did not admire him. Indeed, they felt something rather different from admiration for England and Englishmen. The energy and the power of England had to be respected of course, but Europeans could detect little else that was attractive in those bluff, beef-eating, beer-drinking Englishmen who seemed bent on tearing the civilized world apart.

  For all the power of the English, to cultivated Europe they appeared to be only a cut above the barbarians. Granted they had won victories in war, their merchants pushed their ships all over the world, they dominated commerce almost everywhere, but despite all these successes, Europeans could not bring themselves to extravagant praise or unqualified admiration. The English were after all a people without a culture. No European collected the pictures of English artists or sent his sons to England for education, and the Grand Tour did not include stopovers at English salons.2

  France, not England, was the great nation. European aristocrats admired French culture, collected French art and books, and chose French furniture for the well-appointed room. The fashionable wore French clothes and spoke French—not English, unless they happened to be English. French philosophes set the intellectual standard for all in Europe who admired daring and imagination. Europe found much else in France worthy of emulation: French science as revealed in the Encyclopédie and the Academy dazzled scholars everywhere; merchants and statesmen envied France her modern roads and canals, and especially the growing wealth and population of the nation. Presiding over this strength and culture, this magnificence, was a great monarchy, unhobbled by the limits placed on the Hanoverians in England.3

  In the eyes of European aristocrats, English monarchy was indeed a pale imitation of the real thing. A century earlier the English had taken off one king’s head and driven another to flight. In Europe’s eyes they were an unstable lot, obsessed with parliamentary government, with bills of rights and liberty that cut monarchs down to the size of mayors. They were an unpredictable people, apparently abandoned to limited government and wild adventures overseas—at the expense of European empires.

  As extravagant as these fantasies about the English were, they contained an important truth: English energies were formidable and bent on finding expression in war, trade, and domination. In the capacity to grow, to concentrate power and energy, to bring force to bear in the service of an expansionist policy, no nation in 1760 could match England—not Germany and Italy, which did not exist as modern states but only as hopelessly divided fragments, squabbling powers and principalities unable to pull themselves together; not Prussia, which had a great leader but lacked resources in iron, steel, and coal; not Austria, which also needed industry and commerce; not Spain, once a mighty power, now flatulent, her wealth spent, her energies dissipated, her state in decay; not Portugal, now little more than an English satellite; not the Netherlands, disabled in a paralyzing federal system of government; not Sweden, obviously weak; not Poland, weak, corrupt, and about to endure partition by rapacious neighbors.

  And France, for all her cultivation, her taste, her philosophy, art, and style, was in 1760 also weaker than England. Progressive and advanced in many respects, France had not been able to throw off the remnants of vested interests in church and state. A privileged nobility and a self-indulgent church controlled an antiquated government. The French paid for these ancient luxuries in the war with England, when all Europe came to see that French glories could not be translated into military and political power sufficient to deal with the upstart English, surely the wild men of Europe but—just as surely—the victorious throughout the world.

  There was something askew in the condescension of Europe; English culture was not barbarous. It lacked the imagination and daring that gave French culture its brilliant vitality. And yet the apparent cultivation of the French aristocracy was not responsible for the art and literature of France. French aristocrats patronized the arts of course, but so did the English; neither shaped them nor provided standards of taste and appreciation. French taste was more discriminating than English: one has only to look at the great country houses of English aristocrats to see that size, extravagance, and prodigality charmed the Walpoles and the Pelhams—representatives of the breed—as little else did. Here French sensibilities were surer—more civilized, as eighteenth-century commentators might say.

  What English culture lacked was the almost uniform brilliance of the French. The houses of the English aristocracy were usually vast and cold, but Georgian architecture also had beauty and often showed dignity and restraint. French painting established the European standards; the English was confined largely to portraiture. In France, creativity seemed to thrive; in England, Reynolds with his crowd of assistants carefully depicted stolid English faces with stolid artistic conventions. Gainsborough, who worked alone and who defied prevailing style in favor of his own difference, earned the displeasure of the critics and the public. Hogarth’s savage perceptions went unappreciated. Still, in painting, in architecture, and above all in prose and poetry, the English, if not always breathing beauty, avoided the backwardness that Europe saw.4

  If English high culture was not guilty of the barbarism that fashionable Europe attributed to it, society from the meaner sort to the upper classes was. There was still a ferocity to English life that seemed hard to reconcile with the mania for progress and development. Criminals were hanged publicly; an execution often became an occasion for a celebration. Six months after George III was crowned, an immense London crowd witnessed the hanging of Lord Ferrers at Tyborn for the murder of his steward. Lord Ferrers chose to go to the gallows dressed as he had been for his wedding; all London appreciated the decision, for it was well known that His Lordship had started on the road to the noose on the day he married. The leading role in such spectacles was not usually played by aristocrats, but the occasions were appreciated nonetheless. And they were widely approved; as Dr. Johnson observed, the people of England had the right to see the penalties of their laws enacted on criminals. Criminals thrived in London and on the roads of the countryside. Among the populace they excited fear and admiration. Celebrated in popular ballads and transfixed in Hogarth’s sketches—along with every other order in English society—and skillfully rendered in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, they evaded the hangman more often than not.

  No doubt the average citizen rarely encountered a highwayman, but avoiding the filth, disease, and shabby housing was more difficult. English life had its elegance and beauty—in Georgian houses and in the countryside still bursting with flowers, greenery, and woods untouched by highways and developers. Yet there were slums in villages as well as in London—and ugliness in both. John
Byng, a thoughtful traveler, described the dark huts of Alderminster as “mud without and wretchedness within.”5 Disease in this unsanitary age was widespread, and not only among the common sort, but among the rich and well-born, who were as ignorant and filthy as any. Understandably, perhaps the rich sought relief in dissipation and prodigal display; the poor, in gin and rioting. The middle classes flocked after Wesley and revivalism and perhaps did not suffer badly at all.

  This is a grim picture—a society torn by crime and suffering from inadequate housing, disease, filth, and riot. Social conditions, however, were improving when George III was crowned and had been improving for at least ten years. The underlying reasons were the appearance of industry and the increase in national wealth. English business had made its way all over the world—to Asia and India, to the West Indies, to the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean. The mechanisms of commerce had also improved, fiscal practices had gradually been rationalized, and banking helped in mustering resources. The importance of good transportation was recognized, and better roads, bridges, and canals were constructed. In these circumstances industry took hold; the profits from trade could provide a start, and the new commercial practices helped free resources for development. Inevitably, perhaps, the lives of ordinary people were affected to some small degree, but for the most part only a few benefited from the appearance of industrialism.6

  III

  And the few continued to run things, especially the aristocratic few, the great landowners. Land remained the key to society, to political power, and to prestige.