The Second Anglosphere Civil War
The foundation of the British Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and suspicion but in an epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any other former period.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1783
It is true that each people has a special character independent of its political interest. One might say that America gives the most perfect picture, for good or ill, of the special character of the English race. The American is the Englishman left to himself.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1840
HAMPDEN’S CHORD
Almost exactly the same amount of time separates us from the final defeat of the Loyalist cause at Yorktown in 1781 as separates the Yorktown combatants from the final defeat of Charles I at Preston in 1648. Our generation, especially in the United States, is generally more interested in the later of the two conflicts; but the American revolutionaries themselves were fascinated—obsessed, we might almost say—with the wars of the 1640s. The Second Anglosphere Civil War was fought over the same issues as the First; and, on both sides of the Atlantic, people overwhelmingly picked sides on the same basis that their ancestors had done.
We saw that the origins of the First Anglosphere Civil War lay in three related arguments—over tax, religion, and the location of sovereignty. The buildup to the Second Anglosphere Civil War saw precisely the same three arguments rehearsed in remarkably similar language. Both sides were conscious of the similarities. Whigs in the 1760s, borrowing the epithet that the Parliament men had thrown at Royalists, referred to their opponents as “malignants”; Tories retorted with “Oliverians.”
The fighting, when it came, followed the same ethnic and religious cleavages as the war of 130 years earlier, with uncanny exactness. It did so on both sides of the Atlantic, dividing opinion in Great Britain just as in the colonies. Although the fighting led to one part of the Anglosphere declaring itself independent from the rest, it is anachronistic to think of it as a war between Americans and Britons. It was understood and described by contemporaries as a settlement by force of the Tory-Whig dispute, which by then had exhausted all attempts at peaceful resolution.
As with the First Anglosphere Civil War, we must unclutter our minds of the knowledge of what followed. We know, with hindsight, where the fighting would lead, and so can be tempted to commit Professor Butterfield’s offense of studying the past with one eye upon the present. It takes a certain mental effort to picture the Anglosphere as contemporaries understood it when the quarrels began to intensify in the late 1760s.
After the Glorious Revolution, the English-speaking peoples had turned their faces to the sea. Europe, to most of them, was a source of danger, an unfree continent, teeming with tyrants, Jesuits, and exiled Jacobites. The open seas, by contrast, were a source of opportunity and commercial fortune. The people of the British Isles began to reorient from Europe to the Atlantic. Eastern cities such as Norwich declined, and wealth shifted to the great western ports of Glasgow, Liverpool, and Bristol.
English-speaking settlements and bases formed a ring around the Atlantic littoral, as well as springing up on some of the sparse islands in between. The Atlantic became almost an Anglosphere lake, its gray waves lapping against Nova Scotia, New England, Virginia, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Falkland Islands, St. Helena, Gibraltar, and various African trading posts.
Historians refer to these dominions as the First British Empire, and the American Revolution needs to be understood in the wider context of the Anglosphere as it then stood. There was no American nation before the Declaration of Independence. There were, rather, several English-speaking Atlantic colonies, stretching from subarctic Canada to the subtropical Mosquito Coast protectorate (mainly in present-day Nicaragua). When we think of what is now called the American War of Independence, we need to ignore the present-day map, which shows the United States, Canada, and the various Caribbean territories as separate states, and instead imagine the world map of the late 1760s. The differences between the colonies had to do with culture and politics rather than with divergent national identity.
We may gather the American colonies into six broad groups, some of which had a far more marked tendency to Whig militancy than others. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Canada, which had been conquered from France in 1763, had little interest in radicalism. New England, by contrast, was Puritan, prickly and troublesome. New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were ambivalent in their politics: their Dutch- and German-descended populations tended to be loyal to the Crown, and the Scottish Highlanders of New York became the most detested of all Loyalist troops when the fighting started. The Low Church Chesapeake gentry were broadly Whig. Florida, a garrison province seized from Spain in 1763, had little sympathy with the political agitation of either the New England Yankees or the Virginia radicals. Last were the white planters of the Caribbean, who, outnumbered by their slaves, were strongly antidemocratic.
This picture is, of course, a caricature. In every part of the Anglosphere, almost in every town, there were divided opinions. Wherever the English language was spoken, it was a medium for argument between Whigs and Tories (though they did not always use these names). Nonetheless, it is a convenient shorthand. The three main sources of revolutionary agitation were New England Congregationalists, radical tidewater planters, and the inland Ulster-Protestant settlers (more often, although inaccurately, called Scotch-Irish) spreading from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. New England and Virginia eventually broke away to fulfill their republican aspirations; in doing so, they carried with them the less enthusiastic region between, the Middle Colonies, which had been largely deserted by the government.
The two fringes of Anglophone North America—Canada and Florida, both of which were militarized, thinly populated, and Tory in sympathy—wanted nothing to do with the patriot cause. They declined to participate in the Continental Congress, remained under the Crown, and, following the separation, offered refuge to the Loyalist refugees from the lands that had broken away.
It cannot be stressed too strongly that the American Revolution was an internal argument followed by a civil war. Only after the French became involved in 1778 did it occur to anyone to treat the conflict as one between different states. American Tories emphasized their loyalty to British institutions, above all the Crown-in-Parliament; American Whigs, by contrast, were loyal to the British values upon which the legitimacy of those institutions rested, and which they believed the king himself was violating.
When we look at the great historical panoramas painted by nineteenth-century artists, or watch the versions of the war dreamed up in Hollywood studios, we see colonists marching under the stars-and-stripes. While Betsy Ross’s famous flag was certainly displayed by some Patriots, their favored banner was one that Americans have now largely forgotten: the Grand Union Flag. Known also as the Congress Flag and the Continental Colors, it had the thirteen red and white stripes as they are today, but in the top left-hand quarter, instead of stars, it showed Britain’s flag, made up of the St. George’s Cross for England and the St. Andrew’s Cross for Scotland.
That emblem neatly demonstrates what the Patriots believed they were fighting for, namely a recognition of their rights as Britons. The Grand Union Flag was the banner that the Continental Congress met under, the banner that flew over their chamber when they approved the Declaration of Independence. It was the banner that George Washington fought beneath, that John Paul Jones hoisted on the first ship of the United States Navy. That it has been almost excised from America’s collective memory tells us a great deal about how the story of the revolution was afterward edited.
Most of the places that formed part of the First British Empire are now independent. Only the tiniest—Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, St. Helena, some Caribbean islets—remain under British jurisdiction. The British Empire had a self-dissolving quality, in the sense that the political rights and values it disseminated tended to promote local autonomy and self-reliance.
In the case of the other Atlantic colonies, separation came peaceably and by consent. Most Caribbean states secured independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Canada had internal autonomy from 1867, acquired the attributes and trappings of statehood under the 1931 Statute of Westminster, and repatriated the last elements of constitutional sovereignty from London in 1982.
The centrifugal logic that led to the eventual independence of all these territories, as well as British possessions in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, was present, too, in eighteenth-century America. The colonists had been habituated, from the earliest settlements, to self-rule. Their soil knew neither an episcopacy nor an aristocracy, landownership was widespread, and townships, like congregations, expected to choose their own leaders. This self-reliance, however, was not the main cause of the American Revolution. Even the most radical Patriots accepted, until long after the fighting had started, that the wider British imperium of which they formed a part should be in charge of foreign policy and defense, and most also accepted that such sovereignty implied control over external trade—that is, trade between the Anglosphere and foreign territories rather than among different component parts of the Anglosphere. Britain’s victories over the French had delighted the colonists, who saw them as the providential triumph of a free people over authoritarian and servile foes.
The American Revolution was made by Englishmen who, as their ancestors had done during the 1640s, asserted their rights against a monarchy that they viewed as alien and innovatory.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Victorian poet laureate, came close to the truth in a slightly ponderous poem called “England and America in 1782”:
O thou that sendest out the man
To rule by land and sea,
Strong mother of a Lion-line,
Be proud of those strong sons of thine
Who wrench’d their rights from thee!
What wonder if in noble heat
Those men thine arms withstood,
Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught,
And in thy spirit with thee fought—
Who sprang from English blood!
Whatever harmonies of law
The growing world assume,
Thy work is thine—The single note
From that deep chord which Hampden smote
Will vibrate to the doom.
Tennyson made a connection that would have been familiar to his Victorian readers, strange though it seems to us. He grasped that the American Revolution was a consummation of the English Revolution of which John Hampden, that fiery champion of parliamentary supremacy, had been the central figure.
Hampden, who led the resistance to royal absolutism in the House of Commons in the run-up to the First Anglosphere Civil War, and who was killed by Prince Rupert’s soldiers at the Battle of Chalgrove Field in 1643, was a hero by any standard. His followers worshipped him. Macaulay described his emergence thus: “The nation looked round for a defender. Calmly and unostentatiously the plain Buckinghamshire Esquire placed himself at the head of his countrymen and across the path of tyranny.” His opponents, too, respected his qualities. The Royalist Earl of Clarendon said of him, “The eyes of all men were fixed on him as their Patriae pater, and the pilot that must steer their vessel through the tempests and rocks that threatened it.”
Hampden was an especially titanic figure to the American colonists. Towns in Maine, Maryland, and Connecticut are named after him, as is Hampden County, Massachusetts. Radical pamphleteers in the 1760s and 1770s frequently took his name as their pseudonym. There was a popular, though probably apocryphal, story of his having lived for a time in New England. American Patriots drew explicitly on Hampden’s arguments against Charles I’s Ship Money when formulating their “no taxation without representation” doctrines. When the fighting started, they gave his name to one of the first warships in the U.S. Navy.
This reverence for Hampden is critical to our understanding of the Second Anglosphere Civil War. Hampden had led the parliamentary resistance to the Stuarts during the linked struggles over money, religion, and power in the 1630s. Now that those three same arguments were being held again, his ideological heirs summoned his ghost to their aid.
MONEY, RELIGION, POWER
We like to remember that the American Revolution began with a taxpayers’ revolt. What we often forget is that the taxpayers’ revolt started in Great Britain. Eighteenth-century governments did not busy themselves with all the things that their modern successors do. There was no state funding for health care or education; policing and social security were paid for through local rates. The main financial burden on the central state was military, and an expensive foreign policy could impose huge costs on taxpayers.
Between 1756 and 1763, the Anglosphere had fought the first true world war, taking on its old rivals France and Spain. The fighting raged across Asia, Africa, America, and the West Indies, and in every theater there were stunning British victories. Canada was conquered, as were most French possessions in India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Manila and Havana were torn away from Spain. No one now doubted that the British Empire was the world’s foremost power, least of all the British themselves. “We ne’er meet our foes but we wish them to stay, they ne’er meet us but they wish us away,” was a typically swaggering line from the popular naval song “Hearts of Oak,” composed to celebrate the triumph.
“Look around,” the rising Whig politician Charles James Fox boasted to his fellow MPs. “Observe the magnificence of our metropolis, the extent of our empire, the immensity of our commerce and the opulence of our people.”
But the victory had not come cheap. The national debt had risen from £72 million in 1755 to £130 million in 1764 and, for the first time, the English-speaking peoples began to understand the concept of imperial overstretch. (It was at this time that Edward Gibbon began work on his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Quite apart from having to protect far-flung provinces against French and Spanish revanchism, the Anglosphere had for the first time annexed foreign populations whose loyalty could not be automatically assumed. Seventy thousand French-speaking Catholics had been brought under the Crown in Quebec, along with many times that number of Indian Muslims and Hindus. The costs of garrisoning this new global empire were added to the war debts.
By the end of the fighting—known in Britain as the Seven Years’ War, and in the United States as the French and Indian War—the average inhabitant of Great Britain was paying twenty-five shillings a year in tax. But the average inhabitant of North America was paying only sixpence: one-fiftieth as much. Taxes in North America were negligible by contemporary standards: the total tax take, according to the historian Robert Palmer, was around one-twenty-sixth of what it was in England. It was the refusal of British taxpayers to carry this burgeoning load that led Parliament to look for ways to make the American colonies contribute financially to their own defense.
The arguments that ensued closely followed the contours of the fiscal disputes of the 1630s and 1640s. As far as we can tell, the principle mattered more than the amounts. The ministry in London was pigheaded in some of the levies it proposed, above all the Stamp Act, which required a license to be purchased for many printed materials, including playing cards, legal documents, and—an unbelievably inept addition—newspapers. Yet the strength of opposition led the ministry to back down almost immediately: the Stamp Act was repealed a year after it took effect.
Other laws that now loom large in the list of prerevolutionary grievances, such as the Sugar Act, were an early example of Laffer curve thinking. Instead of declaring high notional levies, which were then widely evaded by smugglers, Parliament sought to cut the duty, but also actually to collect it—to the horror, naturally, of the smugglers.
Indeed, the legislation that sparked the Boston Tea Party—and thus the war—was a lowering of the duty on imported tea.
Tempting though it always is to look for financial incentives, we are left with the conclusion that the colonists were genuinely more upset by the idea of “no taxation without representation” than by the amounts of revenue being levied from them, which remained exceptionally low by comparison with the rest of the Anglosphere, and lower still by comparison with contemporary Europe.
Why, then, did the dispute turn violent? Because, in truth, it was never really about the money. The most active opponents of the various new levies—the committees of correspondence, the secret societies, the delegates to the Stamp Act Congress—were animated by the folk memory of the anti-Stuart struggle in which their ancestors had fought. In citing Hampden’s battle against Ship Money, they were consciously recalling the popular resistance that had saved the English-speaking peoples from tyranny. “What an English King has no right to demand, an English subject has a right to refuse,” Hampden had argued—a phrase endlessly quoted in the 1760s and 1770s. Whigs in America, as in Britain, were convinced that the new imposts undermined their freedom and degraded the exceptionalism that was their birthright as Englishmen.
We have seen that, under James I and Charles I, the arguments over revenue were as bitter as they were because they were tinged with sectarian differences. The same was true in the 1760s and 1770s. In both cases, the Crown found itself in the awkward position of holding both arguments simultaneously, often with the same opponents.
The religious dimension of the American Revolution has been neglected by most historians. No one much likes to dwell on the bellicose Protestantism in the colonies. The distinguished professor of British and American history J. C. D. Clarke concluded that “the virulence and power of popular American anti-Catholicism is the suppressed theme of colonial history.”
It is hard to disagree. We have already noted the furious reaction to the recognition of the Catholic Church in Quebec. In 1774, delegates to the First Continental Congress raged against what they saw as a sickening betrayal:
And by another Act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended . . . that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.
Again, we need to remember that popular anti-Catholicism was political, not doctrinal. In the colonies, as in Great Britain, it was widely supposed that Catholics were not reliably patriotic, that their ultimate loyalty was to foreign powers. John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers, who went on to become the first Chief Justice of the United States, used precisely the same reasoning as Locke to argue that his home state of New York should extend full toleration to every sect
except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of this State, until such a time as the said professors shall appear in the supreme court of this State, and there most solemnly swear, that they verily believe in their consciences, that no pope, priest or foreign authority on earth, hath power to absolve the subjects of this State from their allegiance to the same.
John Adams, the second president, wondered, “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?”
Thomas Jefferson, the third, believed that Catholicism was inseparable from political authoritarianism: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
These views, though widespread, were not universal. James Madison, the fourth president, seems to have been free of religious prejudice, and George Washington was disdainful of sectarianism of any kind. Indeed, it is in no small measure thanks to the political stature of its first president that the United States was born not only as a decentralized republic but also as a state without legal religious discrimination.
Washington was consciously holding up an example for his more hotheaded countrymen. He had come across plenty of religious bigotry, and well understood the worldview of those who saw the rise and fall of nations as signs of God’s favor or disapprobation, and military triumphs as providential, a sign that the Reformation had been divinely ordained.
We, in our age, find it much harder to enter into that mind-set. Nor can we easily understand why contemporary English-speaking Catholics and High Churchmen were so nervous about letting individuals read the Bible and make their own decisions about forms of worship. In fact, that belief was entirely understandable in the context of its time.
The very belligerence with which some Protestant sects pursued their convictions served to convince many Catholics and Anglicans that disseminating the scriptures without context or instruction was unsettling. The book of Revelation is strong stuff, promising a “New Jerusalem” that will arise when the “Whore of Babylon” has been overthrown. Some contemporaries saw these passages not as theology but as a political manifesto, and equated the “Whore of Babylon” with whomever they happened to dislike. Without context and interpretation, parts of the New Testament did indeed incite millenarian violence.
There were good reasons, it seemed to many, why the people had for centuries not been allowed to swallow unlimited drafts of these texts but had instead had them rationed out and strained through the cloth of sacerdotal Latin. Look what had happened, they remarked, once vernacular Bibles became widespread.
The seventeenth-century poet Samuel Butler had spoken of how the contemporary Puritan would strive “to prove his doctrine orthodox / By apostolic blows and knocks.”
The same was true in Massachusetts during the following century. And here, too, the “Whore of Babylon” was taken by some militant Protestants to mean not just Rome but any Christian sect whose practices were deemed too ritualistic.
Just as seventeenth-century Puritans had suspected High Church Anglicans of having Romish leanings, so their descendants carried that conviction into North America. The Anglican Church was established in some of the colonies, a cause of constant grievance to the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and other Dissenters who saw it as a bulwark of authoritarian government.
For these men, ideological and usually lineal heirs of the Roundheads and Covenanters, the war was a spiritual one, a crusade against idolatry and superstition. George III’s Church of England was, in their eyes, hopelessly corrupt, repressing intellectual freedom just as the Tories longed to repress political freedom. The Quebec Act had confirmed what Nonconformists had always half suspected, namely that High Church Anglicans, with their altar rails and bishops and stately communions, were to all intents and purposes allies of Rome.
The rows over the Sugar and Stamp Acts were, for these psalm-singing men, the battlefield that God happened to have ordained for them, just as taxation happened to be the issue that the Pharisees had used to tempt Jesus. It was the religious dimension that made the fiscal disputes so intractable. The great historian of religion in America, William Warren Sweet, put it well: “Religious strife between the Church of England and the Dissenters furnished the mountain of combustible material for the great conflagration, while the dispute over stamp, tea and other taxes and regulations acted merely as the matches of ignition.”
As in the 1630s and 1640s, the mixture was highly flammable. And, as then, the fiscal and religious disputes had a way of spilling over into an argument about the location of sovereignty.
In both cases, historians, knowing where that argument led, tend to emphasize the constitutional rows over the sectarian differences that sustained them. Yet, in the minds of contemporaries, the fiscal, denominational, and democratic arguments were different aspects of a single issue. Protestantism, low taxes, property rights, and parliamentary self-government were, in Whig minds, fused into a libertarian alloy; an alloy that could not now be melted back down into its separate elements.
Legislative independence was assumed by most Americans to be a birthright their forebears had carried to Plymouth Rock. But it was also seen as the surest way to secure their religious and fiscal rights. Which is why, as the arguments became more venomous, the colonists moved beyond the questions of tax and the creation of American bishops—questions that, by 1775, had largely been settled in their favor—and focused instead on the question of parliamentary sovereignty.
Looking back in 1800, Madison, the future president, came up with as neat a summary of the constitutional objectives of the Patriots as you could ask: “The fundamental principle of the Revolution was that the colonies were co-ordinate members with each other and Great Britain of an empire united by a common sovereign, and that legislative power was maintained to be as complete in each American parliament as in the British parliament.”
Stated thus, it seems a remarkably moderate proposition, and many in Britain saw it as such. Whigs in the House of Commons moved to accommodate what they saw as the colonists’ just demands. In 1775, William Pitt the Elder proposed to repeal every piece of legislation that the American Patriots had found objectionable, beginning with the Sugar Act, and to recognize the Continental Congress as, in effect, an American parliament, coequal with Britain’s.
Even at this late hour, the acceptance of such a scheme would probably have secured the continued unity of the Anglosphere. The American colonies would have drifted nonviolently to eventual independence in the way that Canada and Australia did. The Kingdom of America might very well today form part of the Commonwealth.
But the House of Lords, Tory and authoritarian, had no intention of compromising with what it saw as unlawful rebellion. Pitt’s proposals were voted down, 61 to 32. The last real chance for a political settlement was lost.
The balance of opinion in Britain’s hereditary chamber should not blind us to the sympathy that existed for the colonists’ grievances, not just at popular level, but within the political nation. The American cause united the greatest parliamentarians of the time: Pitt himself, the dashing radical leader Charles James Fox, and the intellectual grandfather of the conservative Anglosphere tradition, Edmund Burke. America may, indeed, have been the only issue that brought these three titans together.
We need to remember that the quarrel was still seen by all sides as a family row. We must not think, anachronistically, of British radical sympathy with the American Patriots as being support for a foreign ally. Whigs formed a single faction within a single polity, and felt equally threatened by a ministry that seemed bent on returning to Stuart Toryism.
“I rejoice that America has resisted,” Pitt had proclaimed when, a few years earlier, he had torn into the Stamp Act. “Three million people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest [of us].”
Burke, one of the greatest orators ever to have graced Parliament, made powerful speeches on behalf of the colonists, whom he unquestioningly took for fellow countrymen. Indeed, Americans were, for him, more British than those who had remained in the mother island, for they had exaggerated the peculiar concept of liberty that was the distinguishing feature of English-speaking peoples: “The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.”
Burke was in no doubt that, in pressing their rights, the American radicals were asserting rather than denying their English heritage. It was, he told MPs, a peculiarity of England that its constitutional development had turned on the question of taxation, and its liberties had grown out of the struggle to ensure that only the people’s elected representatives might raise revenue: “The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.” And as they had exaggerated that aspect of their national identity, so they had exaggerated the religion that was thought to be inextricably linked to political freedom: “The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.”
Burke was convinced that the only way to settle the unrest was to confirm the rights of the colonists as full British citizens: “Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American Empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.”
Burke’s views were, as far as we can tell, popular in the country at large. But they had less support in the House of Commons, whose members were elected on a limited franchise and, in some cases, saw professions of exaggerated loyalty to the king as a route to preferment and emoluments. More than a century after the Restoration of Charles II, ancient cleavages could still be glimpsed on the leather benches: one study of the minority of MPs who opposed the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 found a roll call of Cavalier surnames: Bagot, Curzon, Grosvenor, Harley.
The government was prepared to make concessions on the level of the new taxes, but not on the principle of its right to levy them. In the eyes of George III and his ministers, the way to deal with dissent was through firm measures. They had, they believed, done more than enough to meet the religious and fiscal concerns of the colonists. What they would not do was surrender the sovereignty of the British Parliament, which, in their eyes, was the supreme council of the Anglosphere. It might license subordinate local chambers in the colonies. But there was a difference between devolution and federalism.
It was true, ministers conceded, that people in Boston had no representatives in the House of Commons. But then, neither had most people in, say, Birmingham, England. Both, argued ministers, were “virtually represented,” in the sense that they had champions and sympathizers there. Patriots retorted that Birmingham, too, should have actual representation. Pitt described the notion of “virtual representation” as “the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man; it does not deserve serious refutation.”
But Lord North and his government remained obdurate. Like unpopular regimes in every age, ministers convinced themselves that they were dealing only with a handful of troublemakers and that, if these were dissuaded by a show of force, the bulk of the population would be loyal. That calculation turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Just as had happened in the 1640s, events had already taken on a force of their own. The argument was no longer about taxation or religion, but about power. The decision to send General Gage to disarm the Massachusetts militia was the precise equivalent of Charles I’s attempt to control the English militia, and was seen as such. All over New England, men swarmed to join armed bands thrown together to resist the regulars. The Second Anglosphere Civil War had begun.
THE SECOND COUSINS’ WAR
Once the fighting had started, the Crown’s cause in New England was lost. The only way to hold down a population in armed revolt would have been through repressive measures that were unthinkable in the English-speaking world, even among the most extreme supporters of the regime. The war that followed was, in reality, fought to determine which other colonies would follow New England, and on what terms the partition would be made.
Far from being prepared to terrorize the American population, most inhabitants in Great Britain sympathized with the Patriot rather than the Loyalist cause. The government had enormous difficulty finding recruits, especially in England. Like the Stuart Kings, George III was fatally obliged to look for soldiers in Scotland, Ireland, and—the issue that swung moderate opinion in the Americas against him—Europe.
Responding to Pitt’s proposed redress of colonial grievances in 1775, the former lord chancellor, the Earl of Camden, had issued a strikingly wise and accurate prophecy:
To conquer a great continent of 1800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly united on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice, seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in. It is obvious, my Lords, that you cannot furnish armies or treasure competent to the mighty purpose of subduing America, but whether France and Spain will be tame, inactive spectators of your efforts and distractions is well worthy the considerations of your Lordships.
Wars have a way of hardening opinions on both sides. Like the Roundheads of the 1640s, American Patriots found that they had started down a road that led inexorably to republicanism. They could not treat the king as a military enemy one day and invite him to resume his rule over them the next. In London, too, the mood quickly turned, especially after the New Englanders invaded Canada in the fall of 1775. Having passed the Sugar and Stamp Acts in the sincere belief that they would make possible a lower land tax in Great Britain, the country gentlemen in the House of Commons now loyally approved a rise in the land tax to four shillings to pay for the war effort.
Where the First Anglosphere Civil War had united the English-speaking peoples in a single state, the Second ended in a rupture. One consequence is that later generations of historians have tended to cover only their side of it. We have already seen how, in the United States, the story of Paul Revere’s ride has been doctored to make it seem as if the fighting were between Americans and Britons—a concept that no one at the time would have recognized. The very title “War of Independence” is misleading, for it implies that there was an extant American nation being ruled by a different nation in the sense that, say, the Congo was ruled by Belgium.
Most American historians have focused overwhelmingly on events on their side of the Atlantic, giving some consideration to the Loyalists (the most hard-line of whom conveniently departed after the war), but little to the pro-American tendency in Great Britain. Most British historians have made the equivalent error. That is to say, while they have explored the motives of the radicals in Great Britain, they have tended to treat their support for American Whigs as sympathy with an overseas cause, much as later generations of British radicals were to campaign for Spanish Republicans or anti-apartheid South Africans.
One writer who approached the conflict in terms that contemporaries would have understood—namely as a civil war with ancient roots within the Anglosphere—was the former Reagan administration official Kevin Phillips. In 1995, disgusted by the tawdriness of Clinton-era Washington, he retreated to his Connecticut home to write a book about whether, had “the British” been a bit tougher during the Saratoga campaign in 1777, the American Revolution might have been forestalled. But the more he studied the period, the more ambitious his project became. As he explored the reasons that British generals had been so reluctant to prosecute the war more vigorously, he began to see that the origins of the American Revolution were in fact to be found in the British Isles. Having tramped across the battlefields of Saratoga and Yorktown, he soon found himself doing the same at Naseby and Marston Moor (Britain, unlike the United States, is shamefully neglectful of these sites: where American battlefields are beautifully tended and covered with memorials, British ones are left as turnip fields and are often bisected by new roads).
Being a political strategist rather than a professional historian, Phillips stumbled upon something that eluded most specialists, namely the essential continuity between the two Anglosphere civil wars. In both cases, Puritan militiamen with names like Isaiah and Obadiah were battling against what they saw as a corrupt, tyrannical, crypto-Catholic monarchy. In both cases, the battle touched every part of the Anglosphere: England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America. And, in both cases, these places tended to divide along the same geographical and denominational lines.
Indeed, Phillips took the argument one stage further. For him, the American Civil War was also a continuation of the earlier two Anglosphere civil wars. Once again, he saw accustomed battle lines taking shape, as the New England Yankees, who had led the fighting against Charles I and George III, invoked their “God of War” in a new crusade. Once again, he saw the Episcopalian landowners of the South using the arguments that Royalists had used, namely that they were defending an orderly, settled, natural way of life against agitators and enthusiasts. Once again, he saw factions in Britain ranging themselves familiarly, with Nonconformists and evangelicals backing the Union while Tories looked kindly on a confederacy whose leading men had toyed with the idea of making Victoria their queen in return for British recognition.
The result of all these researches was the seminal 1999 book The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. Its central thesis—that the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War were three spasms in one ongoing conflict—sounds implausible when baldly stated. But Phillips had done his homework, tracing the loyalties of church groups and even individual families from one war to the next, and finding extraordinary political continuities. The mark of a convincing new thesis is that, though it may jar at first, it afterward seems obvious. Once the American Revolution is understood as a civil war, much falls into place.
Phillips looked in detail at who had chosen which side in the Americas, and found that, in most cases, their sympathies were inherited from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Strongest for the Patriot cause were the New England Yankees; the Low Church tidewater gentry of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; and the Ulster Protestants. In George Washington’s darkest moment, leading the remnants of the Continental Army away from the debacles of Germantown and Brandywine, he despairingly wrote: “If defeated everywhere else, I will take my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of my native Virginia.”
Strongest for the Crown were the High Anglicans, German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, and Scottish Highlanders (Jefferson had to be made to remove a specific attack on Scotland from the Declaration of Independence).
It goes without saying that these are broad generalizations. Almost every county was divided. Some families fell out. Many people simply wanted to be left alone. John Adams’s assessment that “we were about one third Tories and one third timid and one third true blue” is not far off the mark. The best guess of historians nowadays is that around 20 percent of the active white population of the Thirteen Colonies was Loyalist, around 40 percent Patriot, and 40 percent neutral. It was George III’s wavering between petulance and weakness that eventually pushed most of the “timid” into the Whig camp.
As often happens in civil wars, the national conflict overlaid and absorbed local vendettas that had little to do with the issues at stake. If one group picked a side, its local rivals would often pick the other. Many Native Americans, for example, fought for the Crown, seeing it as an ally against land-hungry settlers. But their decision pushed some tribes, for reasons of inherited enmity, onto the Patriot side. Many slaves fought with the Loyalists hoping for emancipation, which drew some slave owners into a more radical position than they might otherwise have chosen. As one historian of American loyalism put it, “In every feuding neighborhood they [Loyalists] were one of the two local parties; for irrelevant disputes were generally not abandoned at the onset of war: instead they quickly took on, almost at random, the larger enmities of Whig and Tory.”
One especially fateful decision was the Crown’s refusal to attempt a large-scale occupation of the colonies after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The ministry hung back, hoping for reconciliation, but in practice ensuring that armed revolt spread well beyond Massachusetts. Phillips was in no doubt about the consequence:
From May 1775, when the events at Lexington and Concord became known, to November 1777, as the word of victory at Saratoga spread, the majority of the thirteen colonies were unoccupied for most of those 30 critical months. No significant troops were present to interrupt rebel consolidation of political power. Hardly any were on hand to inhibit collection of local tax revenues, control of local militia, and procurement of food supplies, weapons, and munitions. Historically, this has not been the way to quell a revolution.
Indeed. But George’s ministry had a problem. There was little appetite in Great Britain for a repressive war against fellow countrymen whose grievances struck most people as just.
Several senior military officers who had served against the French in North America—Lord Amherst, Sir Henry Conway, and others—flatly refused to take up arms against the colonists. Those who did agree carried out their commissions to the letter, but without enthusiasm. Generals Gage, Carleton, and Howe made clear that they were unhappy with the war, and in consequence were heartily disliked by American Tories. Even Generals Burgoyne and Clinton had no stomach for the kind of coercive force that would have been required to bring the rebels to heel. One gets the impression that these were men doing their duty rather than fighting to win.
Their distaste for the task was widely shared in the British Isles, which divided much as they had during the 1640s. Of course, these things are not easy to gauge scientifically. The British Parliament was elected with a very restricted franchise, and the views of the unrepresented classes cannot be precisely measured. Still, we can get an idea from the circulation of the newspapers that favored one side or the other; from petitions to Parliament, either for coercion or for conciliation; and from the attitudes of that minority of MPs who, under the Byzantine electoral system that pertained before the rationalization of 1832, represented more populous constituencies.
What we find is telling. Public opinion in Great Britain seems to have been remarkably similar to that in the colonies, with perhaps 25 to 30 percent of the population broadly Tory in inclination, and the rest Whig with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The main reason that the American legislatures were so much more radical than the House of Commons turns out to be a rather banal one: land was more evenly distributed in America, and the colonial assemblies were elected by a far higher proportion of the male population. They were therefore more representative of public opinion as a whole.
Even more fascinating is how the British Isles divided geographically, for here we see an almost exact replication of the battle lines of the First Anglosphere Civil War. The areas that were strongest for the American rebels were those that had resisted the Stuarts most fiercely: the Scottish Lowlands (especially the southwest); London and its surrounding counties; the Puritan flatlands of Cromwell’s old Eastern Association; the Nonconformist cloth towns; and Ulster, whose martial inhabitants were soon forming militias and drilling in mimicry of their Pennsylvanian cousins.
The parts of England that, by contrast, were keenest on coercion, at least if we judge by the evidence of their petitions to Parliament, were the old Stuart redoubts: the West Midlands and, above all, Lancashire. With recruiting sergeants in England struggling to find men for the American campaign, Lord North was forced to turn to the old Jacobite heartlands of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.
James II’s heirs had never abandoned their claim to the throne, and the first half of the eighteenth century had seen constant Jacobite plots and invasion scares, as well as full-scale risings in 1715 and 1745. The second of these ended in the obliteration of the Jacobite cause when Charles Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of James II and son of James Stuart whose birth had prompted the warming-pan story, was routed at Culloden Moor. The distance of that defeat gives it a patina of Romantic imagery: the glint of claymores, the mist rising from the heather, the dashing escape of the tartan-clad prince. But most contemporary English-speakers reacted with dizzy relief. The old threat to their liberty and property—or, more prosaically, to their Protestantism and their commercial success—had finally been lifted.
With Jacobitism finished, most Highlanders swung behind the Hanoverian dynasty with the same stolid fidelity they had offered the Stuarts. They fought with terrifying ferocity against their former French allies in the Seven Years’ War as, indeed, they have in almost every major British engagement since. As William Pitt the Elder put it in 1766:
I sought for merit wherever it could be found. It is my boast that I was the first Minister who looked for it and found it in the Mountains of the North. I called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of men; men who left by your jealousy became a prey to the artifices of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the State in the War before last [the 1745 rising]. These men in the last War were brought to combat on your side; they served with fidelity as they fought with valor, and conquered for you in every quarter of the world.
The American unrest was an opportunity for the sons of the men beaten at Culloden to prove their faith again, while at the same time striking a blow against the descendants of the Covenanters, their ancient foes. Highlanders made up a majority of the regular forces that saw action in the American campaign, forming no fewer than ten regiments. They were complemented by volunteer battalions formed by their émigré kinsmen. Large numbers of demobilized Highlanders had purchased land in the colonies after the Seven Years’ War, some along the Hudson Valley, others in the Carolinas. These men now rushed to answer the king’s call, a few wearing the Jacobite white cockade in their bonnets. They formed several auxiliary Tory regiments: the North Carolina Highlanders, the Royal North British Volunteers, the Highland Company of the Queen’s Rangers. This last is now a Canadian regiment, the Queen’s York Rangers, for many of these loyal men chose exile in the north rather than life in a republic.
Ireland, too, was largely for the Crown. Once more, the evidence is necessarily patchy. Because Catholics were excluded from political life, the MPs and town corporations reflected only the views of the Protestant minority—who were, for the most part, fiercely Whig. Again, though, when we look at petitions, at the declarations of Catholic priests and, not least, at the number of military volunteers, there is no denying the enthusiasm for the Royalist cause in Ireland—though, naturally, generations of Irish Americans have done their best to deny it, focusing on the exceptions and, on occasion, blurring the distinction between Scotch-Irish and Irish. Still, studies by Owen Dudley Edwards and Conor Cruise O’Brien are conclusive. Irish Catholics were overwhelmingly Loyalist and, indeed, their loyalty at last won them relief from some of the penal legislation that had been in place since the Flight of the Wild Geese. Laws passed during the American war lifted many of the civil disabilities from which Irish Catholics suffered and restored their right to bear arms and serve as soldiers.
Phillips’s book contained no new primary research. All of its facts were drawn from published works of history, some of them dating from the early twentieth century. Yet, in bringing the data together open-mindedly, Phillips gave a sense of perspective to the Anglosphere Civil Wars—the Cousins’ Wars—that had eluded many academic historians.
Like the First Anglosphere Civil War, the Second was fought in a gentlemanly fashion—not just by the standard of its time, but by the standard of civil wars generally. The routine roundups and massacres that accompanied, say, the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s were unknown, and the occasional lapses by one side or the other were newsworthy precisely because they were occasional. Some Tories had their property confiscated; some unpopular officials were tarred and feathered. But, as in the English Civil War, the machinery of local government, including the sheriff’s offices, functioned throughout the war.
Casualties were, in the context of their age, almost unbelievably light. According to the U.S. Defense Department, there were 4,435 fatalities and 6,188 other casualties on the Whig side. Tory losses were even slighter. When we think of the tens of thousands who were dying in Britain’s wars against France at the time, Yorktown was a skirmish.
Though Hollywood would have us believe otherwise, the military authorities on both sides did their best to behave chivalrously. When the governor of Quebec, Sir Guy Carleton, was asked why he treated Whig prisoners so well, he replied, “Since we have tried in vain to make them acknowledge us as brothers, let us at least send them away disposed to regard us as first cousins”—which is, more or less, what happened.
In all wars, of course, there is sequestration and looting, but such atrocities as there were did not happen at the hands of regular forces on either side. Rather, they were the result of local internecine feuds that often had little to do with the national issue.
Nathanael Greene, Washington’s most trusted general, was horrified by the vicious ambuscades and cattle raids he found in South Carolina: “The animosity between the Whigs and Tories of this state renders their situation truly deplorable. There is not a day passes but there are more or less who fall a sacrifice to their savage dispositions. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories and the Tories the Whigs.”
In the end, of course, the Whigs prevailed. And, unlike in the 1640s, they were now in a position to remove the more dangerous of their enemies. While 80 percent of the Loyalist population remained in the republic, the most doctrinally committed Tories left, either by choice or from social pressure. Those leaving the southern states generally relocated to Florida, the West Indies, and the Bahamas, often taking their slaves with them. Most of those fleeing the Middle Colonies and New England headed north, some to Quebec, more to Nova Scotia, where a new province was eventually carved out to accommodate them: New Brunswick. A few went as far as the British Isles.
The Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff estimates that a total of 60,000 Tories, including 10,000 black Loyalists, emigrated. Of these, 33,000 settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; 6,600 in Quebec; 5,000 in Florida; and 13,000 (including 5,000 free blacks) in Great Britain. A number of the black Tories ended up founding a settlement in Sierra Leone.
At the same time, Whig and radical emigration from Great Britain to what was now the United States of America began to increase following independence. Perhaps five million British migrants crossed the Atlantic in the century and a half after the Declaration of Independence, and while the migration was overwhelmingly economic, the United States always exerted a stronger pull for British radicals than did alternative destinations.
The Tory-Whig division, though its balance had varied from place to place, had existed throughout the Anglosphere. After 1776, however, the Whigs won more or less total political control of one part of the English-speaking world. What followed was the most perfect consummation of English Whig philosophy in the form of the U.S. Constitution and, most especially, the Bill of Rights.
All states develop according to the DNA that was fixed at the moment of their conception. The United States of America was founded on a series of premises: that concentrated power corrupts; that jurisdiction should be dispersed; that decision makers should be accountable; that taxes should not be raised, nor laws passed, save by elected representatives; that the executive should be answerable to the legislature.
The men who met in the old courthouse at Philadelphia were determined to prevent a repetition of the abuses through which they had lived. In consequence, they came up with the most successful constitution on earth: one that, to this day, has served to keep the government under control and to aggrandize the citizen. The peculiarities of the American governmental model—states’ rights, the direct election of almost every public official, an accountable judiciary, primaries, ballot initiatives, balanced budget rules, term limits—all are a working out of the Jeffersonian ideal of the maximum devolution of power. If the Second Anglosphere Civil War was the genotype, they are the phenotype.
Yet again, we need to remind ourselves that the Founders saw themselves as conservatives, not innovators. In their own eyes, all they were doing was guaranteeing the liberties they had always assumed to be their heritage as Englishmen. Far from creating new rights, they were reasserting rights that they traced back through the Glorious Revolution, through the First Anglosphere Civil War, through Simon de Montfort’s campaigns, through even the Great Charter itself to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon freedoms.
I have tried to show that their version of history was nowhere near as fanciful as is often claimed. The exceptionalism of pre-Norman England was real enough. The English-speaking peoples were indeed set apart by their political structures. In a sense, though, what mattered most was that these things were believed to be true.
The histories most widely read in the colonies—Nathaniel Bacon’s Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England; Henry Care’s English Liberties; Lord Kames’s British Antiquities—all told the same story: in 1066, a free people had lost their liberties to a Continental invader, and their subsequent history had been a struggle for the restoration of those liberties. Even at the time of independence, there were several Americans who were aware of having non-English ancestry, yet they cheerfully bought into a self-consciously Anglo-Saxon political identity.
That identity was now exalted. The seventeenth-century campaign to “throw off the Norman Yoke” had finally been vindicated. William the Conqueror’s lieutenants and their Tory descendants had been banished.
On both sides of the Atlantic, many regretted that these outcomes had required a rupture. One of the most wistful and beautiful lines that Jefferson had put in the Declaration of Independence was eventually excised from the final version: “We might have been a great and free people together.”
By then, though, events had moved on. As Lord Camden had foreseen, France and Spain were not “tame, inactive spectators” during the fighting. The involvement of these ancient foes had the same effect on moderate opinion in Great Britain that George III’s infamous decision to use German mercenaries had had on moderate opinion in the colonies.
France formally declared war on Great Britain in 1778, and Spain in 1779, and soon engagements were being fought from the Caribbean to Gibraltar, from India to Central America. In this new world war, North America became a sideshow. Even George III slow-wittedly came round to the idea that his sovereignty in the colonies was over. “It is a joke to think of keeping Pennsylvania or New England,” he declared. “They are lost.”
That large body of transatlantic opinion, which, as late as 1775, had hoped for some form of Anglo-American federation, was quickly dispersed before the volleys of foreign muskets. The sundering of the Anglosphere became an accepted fact—although a further war had to be fought in 1812 before British Tories accepted emotionally what they had accepted legally, namely that the United States was a wholly independent state rather than a sort of tolerated protectorate; that it had the same naval rights as any other power; and that British subjects who emigrated there became foreign citizens, and were no longer subject to conscription.
The political unity of the English-speaking peoples had been short-lived. After its Second Civil War, the Anglosphere reverted to being a legal, cultural, and linguistic entity rather than a single state.
Its partition had happy consequences for both sides. In Britain, the downfall of Lord North’s rotten ministry was followed by urgent administrative reform. The power and prestige of the monarchy declined, that of Parliament expanded, and there was a focus on meritocracy and efficiency. Pitt the Elder’s son, William Pitt the Younger, became prime minister in 1783 at the age of just twenty-four. He was to lead the government, with one intermission, until his early death in 1806, and was as restless, brave, and brilliant an occupant as 10 Downing Street has known. He restored the national finances, prepared the ground for the abolition of slavery in 1807, and defeated a resurgent, revolutionary France.
The independence of the United States turned out to be a great boon for the Anglosphere’s military cause. Instead of having to divert significant troops and resources to North America, Britain was able to concentrate on other fronts, knowing that the Americans could be relied upon to press their own claims vigorously against France and Spain—which nations, indeed, they soon ousted altogether from their continent.
The split accelerated the shift from mercantilism and monopolies to free trade. Anglo-American commerce had recovered to prewar levels by 1785, doubled by 1792, and has been exceptionally strong ever since.
The separation also gave the Anglosphere a boost in a more direct sense, leading to the colonization of two of its core members. The Loyalist exodus to Canada ensured that that great expanse become part of the Anglosphere. Had forty thousand English-speakers not trudged into the snowy north, the entire territory might have remained essentially Gallic in language and culture. And the loss of Georgia, whither Britain had been in the habit of transporting its able-bodied criminals, created the need for a new penal destination. Transportation to Australia, whose more habitable eastern part had been claimed by Britain in 1770, began five years after the recognition of American independence.
Above all, the nature of the war, and the arguments that had preceded it, produced the greatest constitution ever drafted, designed to prevent the concentration of power and written in full awareness of man’s fallen nature. Where most national constitutions come and go every few decades (or, in South America, every couple of years), the U.S. Constitution has served the purpose for which it was intended for more than two centuries—that is to say, it has ensured that the government is constrained and the citizen is free; that jurisdiction is dispersed; that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the people they affect; that power is balanced.
That constitution was not just an American achievement. It was, as its authors were keen to stress, the ultimate expression and vindication of the creed of the English-speaking peoples. The ideals of the rule of law, representative government, and personal liberty, ideals that had their genesis in those ancient forest meetings described by Tacitus, had found their fullest and highest expression.