The Aftermath
For the Anglo-Americans, removal of France as a neighbor ended a source of trouble as old as the colonies. A dream of 1690 had come true, after four long wars; a dream of safety as well as of victory over a rival church. The most immediate change was a feeling of relief on the northern and western frontiers—a feeling not of complete freedom from Indian attack but from combined attacks, from encouragement of savage raids, and from a dangerous rivalry in settlements and land claims. The West lay open, and the Indian stood alone. Spain was too feeble and her territory too distant to serve as the same kind of antagonist. Expulsion of France also checked further development of a dual cultural inheritance in Canada or in the United States. Anglo-Saxon institutions, language, and customs dominated the latter country and came to ascendancy in the former.
The Indians, doomed by the ending of conflict among the colonizing powers, their natural enemies, could no longer count on being courted or placated as allies, even as they could not play one nation against the others. What was worse, they could not even be left alone in the new peace. If it was inevitable that the Americans would expand against their hunting grounds, it was also true that the Indians coveted too many of the white man’s goods to sever that contact. Held together by mutual desire, the Indian culture could not survive exposure to the European. Not only did the French lose the war, therefore, but the Indians did too, even those on the side of the English. Their future efforts to preserve their way of life, to strike back, or even to adapt, form a separate and sad story.
The experience of four colonial wars did not disabuse the Anglo-Americans of the adequacy of militia, nor did it render a professional standing army more palatable. The latter was a specific complaint in the Declaration of Independence. Later on in the Constitution, Congress was given power to raise armies and provide a navy, and to organize and arm militia, all to “provide for the common defence.” A small regular army (one regiment of infantry and one battalion of artillery) had to be maintained to guard the frontier of federal territory. Two defeats by Indians in the Old Northwest caused this army to be enlarged rather than erased. It was the militia of the states, however, that in national emergencies Congress could call forth to execute the laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. Such calls were to be made through the governors according to state quotas.
Throughout the seventy years of conflict England never solved the primary problem of America’s indifference to military service. When the choice was between joining the British regulars or joining the local militia, almost no one would consider the former. Yet the superiority of regulars over militia was repeatedly demonstrated. On occasion the militia performed well—as at Port Royal in 1710, Louisbourg in 1745, and Fort Frontenac in 1758—occasions of talented leadership, short-range objectives, and strong motivation; but for grim campaigning or dull garrison duty, discipline and training told the difference.
When, as a concession, a special regiment of regulars (the Sixtieth) was created for Americans, it had a little appeal, but hardly enough to reach its strength of four thousand. It was still the seasonal militia—with a bounty for joining, the privilege of electing company officers, a short term of duty, a particular objective, and perhaps a grant of land upon discharge—that seemed the least of military evils. Nobody was expected to enjoy army duty, and of course no one in his right mind would enter the British navy. Risk of life was no greater in privateering, where discipline was easier and the chance of rich rewards made the service bearable. The same attitude persisted in the American Revolution and exasperated General Washington. It was the “summer soldier” that drew the sarcasm of Tom Paine. Americans were simply not military minded, and in peacetime abhorred a standing army.
The colonial wars should remind Americans that this country’s long policy of isolationism was not traditional from the colonial period. On the contrary! Broad as the Atlantic was to small sailing vessels, the American colonies were quickly embroiled in all European disputes of the seventeenth century and most of those of the eighteenth. When President Washington advised against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address, he was not speaking of a condition which the United States had long enjoyed and should desire to perpetuate but of a new ideal it should hope to achieve. It was the political separation from Great Britain, plus the embarrassment of a continuing alliance with a revolutionary France now lapsed into military dictatorship, which inspired the notion that we ought to shun European quarrels over power.
There was some advancement in the art of war during the four wars. They confirmed the doom of fortified cities and most forts. Cannon balls could pulverize all constructions behind an impregnable wall. Further, four operations in the last war—against Louisbourg, Quebec, Havana, and Manila—were amphibious operations that pointed up the necessity of army-navy co-operation. The lesson was easily forgotten, however, and failure in joint undertakings would recur without penalties against the uncooperative commanders.
Weapons changed little: the musket was still basic. Rifled barrels were an improvement over smoothbores, but Europeans were slow to adopt them. However, the tactics of the Rangers, borrowed largely from the Indians and made effective by rifles, doomed the old formations of exposed battle lines firing by platoons. Again, the European armies failed to do more than develop light infantry companies in each regiment for flexibility. The British learned new tactics grudgingly, and Braddock’s defeat was repeated by Burgoyne in 1777 and by Pakenham in 1815. It was the unmilitary Americans who in 1775 sought as many rifles as they could get and employed Ranger methods against the “old style” British redcoats.
Subtly perhaps but definitely in this last war the Renaissance made its final conquest of a feudal mind. The internal fault of the French colonial system, like that of Spain, was its medieval cast. France had clung too long to outworn concepts of the Middle Ages. She represented a closed society under four authorities: monarch, church, nobility, and monopoly. She secured obedience and uniformity in New France at the expense of initiative and self-reliance. The dissatisfied at home could not escape by migration. The fur trade was awarded to a company that sent over employees. The Crown rewarded favorites and made sycophants; it dispatched troops and then gave them inducements to remain. The church sent priests and nuns. All these groups were overregulated by appointed officials, military officers, bishops, and company directors. At home the French parlement had no actual governing power and was virtually ignored. No revolution curbed the monarch’s power. In New France there was no representative assembly to develop colonial leaders, no competing sects, no critical newspapers, and education was controlled by the church. The variety that makes vitality was missing. The frontier influence could hardly penetrate the insulated colonists.
In Paris, Canada and Louisiana were regarded as parasites on the royal treasury. They ought to return a profit but they did not. Time and again the whole idea of an overseas empire was questioned, because no one understood the prerequisites for successful operation. Only a few individuals, like Champlain or La Salle or Frontenac, who broke from the feudal mold possessed the liberal faith or broad patriotism to envision a French empire of mutually supporting parts. Unfortunately they never had a king with enough imagination to catch their vision, and the measures taken by ministers only exposed the ineptness of a quasi-medieval culture for expansion and variation. It was inelastic and so it cracked under pressure. New France, actually a misnomer, was truly an extension of the Old World, and therein lay its failing.
Parkman has been accused of prejudice in arrogating to the English several virtues he denied the French, but at least he emphasized that there was a difference in the outlook of the two nationalities in America. The prevailing attitude of most of the French in Canada and Louisiana was grounded on exploitation of the country. The habitants themselves, as well as the trading companies back home, were mercantile in outlook. The purpose of the colony was to make money for promoter and settler. In contrast, a large proportion of the English colonists were antimercantile, not in the sense of being indifferent to making money, but in aiming primarily to establish permanent homes under new governments, to put down roots. In time of war the French colonials fought for their king and church, for their economic opportunities, and then for their own safety; the English fought for their homes and their children’s future and then for their king. Certainly they acted as if they had more at stake.
In the period from 1689 to 1762 certain changes took place in the British Empire that were not paralleled in France or Spain. When the first English colonies were founded, England was ruled by the king in council. Parliament, its House of Lords under royal control and its Commons subject to royal pressures, could do no more than trade direct taxes, or subsidies to the Crown, for redress of grievances. There was no department or machinery for administering colonial affairs. They were left to proprietors and commercial companies, who had to make conditions of migration attractive to individual settlers. Failures and difficulties plagued the sponsors, and after many of the colonies had reverted to the Crown, a standing committee of the Privy Council, called the Lords of Trade, was in 1675 put in charge of the colonies. As part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament seated new rulers and asserted its constitutional supremacy over the monarchy; then the cabinet system of executive ministers responsible to Parliament, not to the king, began to develop. The Board of Trade became advisory on colonial matters as Parliament consolidated its powers and supervised colonial government. If the British seem modern in contrast to the French and Spanish, the Anglo-Americans were becoming something still different.
The colonies participated in this evolution in their own manner. Assuming that they occupied the same position relative to the Crown as did Parliament, the colonial assemblies proceeded to delimit the powers of royal governors in the same way and to assert increasing authority. They did not recognize any transfer of power over themselves from the Crown to Parliament. Hence, they continued their long struggle for increasing self-government against Parliament for having “arrogated to itself the same absolute power against which it had fought.” This spirit of self-dependence, so lacking in Canada and Florida, was on every side encouraged by new developments in colonial life. The immigration of non-English peoples, the wide dispersion of property and participation in government, the growth of emotional religious sects against the established Anglican and Puritan formalism, the decay or denial of safeguards preserving social privilege, the evasion of restrictions on colonial trade, the increasing number of newspapers and colleges, and the vigorous expansion of settlement southward and westward—all were remolding the European emigrant.
The European heritage and native experience were distinctively shaped and colored in English America by the frontier exposure, a subtle transformation which only a few perceptive men could describe. The democratizing influence, the demands on resourcefulness and also co-operation, the repeated experience in self-government, the rich rewards of individual effort, the heady atmosphere of relative freedom, the confidence in the future—all these yeasty factors infused and transformed both immigrants and native-born. They were caught up in the exciting eighteenth-century Enlightenment that emphasized man’s potentialities to help himself over the seventeenth-century’s view of his depravity and helplessness. The effect might have been fragmented and dissipated had there been no colonial wars to call the colonies together in common effort. The required military exertion against the enemy forced intercolonial co-operation. With each war the colonies found planning together a little easier, and old fears and suspicions and jealousies somewhat allayed. They almost formed a confederation in 1754 to deal with problems on which the British constitution was silent. They uncovered common complaints, forged joint policies, began to recognize the advantages of knocking down barriers, and experienced the joy of united strength. Dimly they perceived that perhaps they ought to work more closely together.
Their greatest discovery by 1762 was not that with help from home they could kick France out of North America but rather that they were a distinct people who were being aided by kinsmen from England. Cousins they might be under a common king, but third- and fourth-generation Americans generally regarded the native Englishman with curiosity and with as much condescension as respect. He was almost a foreigner. They no longer thought of themselves as “transplanted Englishmen”; two-thirds had been born in America and most of the other third was not English anyway. They had become conscious of their separateness whenever they co-operated with British military forces. They had concluded that London society was morally inferior to their own. Their women realized they enjoyed more freedom and legal rights than the women of England or the Continent. Colonial intellectuals were appearing and had formed the American Philosophical Society in 1743. Even the language was different, as both foreigners and Indians had added new words to the vocabulary of the Americans. Already there was an American outlook and an American style of living and acting. This discovery of themselves was the issue of the fourth colonial war. It was a disquieting discovery, and they were as self-conscious as adolescents for a time. “What then is the American, this new man?” asked St. John de Crèvecœur two decades later, and he went on to describe what he saw then as a whole new breed.
In this frame of mind and with the ancient French menace removed, it was inevitable that the Americans would now examine their imperial relations. They had learned about military co-operation and spoken of the political unity necessary for its full accomplishment; they had developed a foreign trade of which they were jealous; they knew what kind of an army suited them, what tactics and weapons seemed most effective, and how to finance war by paper money; they could appeal to everyone through their numerous newspapers; above all they were not awed by regulars or professional officers. Neither meek nor inarticulate, they would define their position and resist coercion. Pressure could only unify them. At the same moment, faced with new and broader problems of an expanded empire and weighted with an immense war debt, Great Britain turned to re-examine her relations with America. For the men in power, her problems proved to be beyond their capacity to solve.