The War That Made America

The issues that brought Britain and its American colonies repeatedly to blows between 1765 and 1775 were old ones, arising from the attempts of colonial leaders to defend local privileges against the power of imperial authorities trying to impose order on a region they were supposed to govern. The Seven Years’ War and the subsequent Indian rebellion had strained the system of public finance to the breaking point, making British leaders all the more desperate to impose order on a vastly enlarged, disorderly imperial periphery. In effect the war’s extraordinary outcome meant that familiar tensions within the empire could no longer be handled in the traditional way, by merely ignoring them and allowing events to take their own course.

As in Pontiac’s War, the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-1766 erupted when governmental practices that had come to be understood as rights were abruptly challenged by reforms imposed from above, in the name of British sovereignty. In neither case was the violence of those who resisted revolutionary in character. Far from being aimed at the destruction of imperial authority, Indian rebellion and colonial resistance alike reflected a desire to readjust imperial relationships, and make the empire function in a way that those who lived on its margins could recognize as both legitimate and tolerable.

Pitt’s policies, which depended on subsidizing German allies and British colonies as well as on direct military expenditures, had been phenomenally expensive. In 1755 the British national debt had stood at what was then regarded as a very high level, £72,000,000 sterling; in 1763 George Grenville as first lord of the treasury estimated that the war had doubled the debt, to a staggering £146,000,000. Taxes on land and manufactured products that the war had pushed to the limit of British subjects’ ability to pay were yielding annual receipts, by 1763, of approximately £10,000,000. Half of that went to pay interest on the debt; the other half was consumed with fixed costs of government and defense. Nothing could have been clearer to Grenville, the best fiscal technician of his day, than that the money to administer and defend the expanded empire had to come from other pockets than those of taxpayers in the British Isles.

Grenville and his fellow ministers thought it self-evident that the colonies, which had gained so much in security and prosperity from the war, should shoulder the costs of their own defense as a first step toward assuming the larger costs of imperial administration. Never in the past had the metropolis tried to impose these burdens on the colonies. Instead of spending metropolitan money to govern the colonies, the crown had allowed the colonial assemblies to set tax rates and collect revenues sufficient to govern and defend their provinces. This policy, which the opposition politician and writer Edmund Burke called “salutary neglect,” had encouraged legislators in every colony to imagine that they were somehow equal to members of Parliament in taxing authority. The members of colonial assemblies believed that inasmuch as the power to tax arose from the consent of the governed, only they, as duly elected representatives, had the right to impose taxes on their constituents.

But what seemed patently obvious to colonial leaders seemed obviously absurd to George Grenville, and indeed to anyone who understood the British constitution in the technical and sophisticated way His Majesty’s attorney general and solicitor general did. The colonial assemblies existed by virtue of royal charter and hence had no higher legal standing than the aldermen’s corporation in any English borough, or indeed a joint-stock business enterprise. For the colonists to claim that such bodies exercised a taxing authority in their own right was ridiculous. The power to tax, British legal authorities agreed, inhered in the sovereign authority of the state, which by definition possessed the power to appropriate property (in taxation) and take life (in justice and in defense). This all-encompassing, indivisible power belonged solely to the tripartite entity constitutionally vested with sovereign authority: the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons “in Parliament assembled.” Together these three possessed all legitimate authority to pass laws and enforce them. Of the three only the House of Commons could originate tax legislation—its most important, and jealously guarded, power. To argue that sovereign authority could be shared between mere chartered corporations and the king-in-Parliament was an insidious, as well as a legally groundless, position. British jurists universally held that to divide sovereignty was to create a state within a state (imperium in imperio), and hence to invite anarchy, and civil war.

To colonists who understood the right to consent to taxation as fundamental to all English liberty, arguments based on sovereignty alone were fraught with peril. Colonists and their assemblies therefore objected to Parliament’s assumption that it had the right to impose even the lightest of taxes upon them. The fact that the stamp tax that Grenville proposed in 1764 and Parliament passed in 1765 was an exceptionally light duty on legal, commercial, and public documents (deeds, wills, shipping manifests, newspapers, diplomas, and other items) only alarmed them more, for it seemed so clearly to be a vehicle to establish a precedent by which Parliament could in the future levy universal, direct taxes on the colonists. Grenville’s assurances that revenues from the stamp duty would remain in the colonies and pay for the redcoat soldiers who would be permanently stationed there to defend them did nothing to assuage colonial fears. The French empire was gone forever. The Spanish were weak and distant, their control confined to lands west of the Mississippi. Where, then, was an aggressor to threaten the colonies? Only the Indians remained a potential enemy, and against them the regulars had lately proven to be of little, if any, use.

A permanent royal garrison, the colonists concluded, could only be intended to act as a constabulary that would enforce the dictates of a sovereign king-in-Parliament. That was what made the prospect of taxation without representation intensely worrying for the colonists. They believed that if a penny could be extracted from their purses without their consent, shillings and pounds might follow willy-nilly until their whole estates had been confiscated. Then, having been reduced to husks of men with neither property nor rights—that is, to slaves—they would be powerless to resist the arbitrary rule of governors backed by the bayonets of royal troops.

Cantonment of the British forces in North America, October 11, 1765. This map records the location of British forces in North America at the time of the Stamp Act, a tax levied by Parliament to raise funds for the defense of its newly expanded American empire. It shows a virtually complete absence of royal troops from the port cities—Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—where opposition to the act resulted in mob violence, the destruction of property, and the intimidation of crown officers. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

The current state of the colonial economies gave additional cause for alarm. With the return of peace, the transfer payments that had made it possible for the colonies to sustain the very high levels of taxation and participation that had characterized the war effort in 1758 and afterward ended, along with the lucrative contracts that provisioned, clothed, and supplied provincial troops. This abrupt drop in income plunged the northern colonial economies into a deep postwar recession, just at the moment when the heavy debts colonial government had incurred during the war had to be paid off. Both colonial taxes (imposed by the colonists’ own legislators) and unemployment levels in the port towns were therefore at distressingly high levels just as the news of Grenville’s proposed stamp tax arrived.

This volatile combination of ideological and economic factors created an eruption of popular opposition to the stamp tax in the autumn of 1765 that astonished Grenville as much as Pontiac’s Rebellion had Amherst. Especially in the northern cities, mobs—their numbers swelled by unemployed sailors, artisans, and laborers—effectively nullified the act by intimidating the men appointed to collect the tax revenues into resigning their offices. Trade between the colonies and the metropolis collapsed as customhouses, unable to operate legally without stamped paper, closed their doors. Legal processes ceased as courts, which also could not function without stamped paper, shut down. Royal governors and other crown authorities seemed completely unable to restore order, particularly in the absence of regular troops, who were primarily cantoned in Canada and the newly reoccupied western posts.

Chaos in the colonies was red meat to opposition politicians in Parliament, and Pitt’s followers in particular made the most of it with calls for Grenville’s resignation. Even more significantly, the disorders mobilized British merchants whose livelihoods depended on trade with America and the collection of debts from their colonial correspondents. They lost no time in organizing to pressure the ministry to repeal a law that was clearly a fiasco. At first Grenville seemed determined to enforce the act, but in July 1765 he found himself forced from office by an unrelated matter (the king, who was devoted to his mother, concluded that Grenville had behaved disrespectfully toward her). A new ministry, headed by the marquis of Rockingham, sympathized with the merchants and groped its way toward a resolution of the crisis over the next half-year, striving to find some basis for repeal that would not seem to bow to the pressure of mob violence or grant the validity of the colonists’ arguments, or (worst of all) undermine Britain’s claims to unlimited sovereignty over the colonies. Finally, in March 1766, the Rockingham ministry found the formula it needed, repealing the law on the indisputable grounds that it was unenforceable and simultaneously passing a Declaratory Act that asserted that Parliament “had, hath, and of a right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever.”

The colonists scarcely noticed the Declaratory Act as they celebrated the repeal of the stamp tax. A level of public rejoicing unseen since the fall of Canada indicated that the colonists wanted nothing more than to return to business-as-usual in the empire. Americans still regarded themselves as true Britons in 1766, and indeed the great majority would continue to do so until the mid-1770s. The repeal of the Stamp Act, they believed, affirmed that they were in fact what the glorious years 1758-1760 had suggested: partners in empire. Their very devotion to the empire, indeed, was what made the second and third postwar convulsions, the Townshend Acts controversy of 1767-1770 and the Tea Crisis of 1773-1774, so traumatic. Far from being foreshadowings of independence, these were passionate debates over what the empire should be, and what membership in it would mean for Britons on both sides of the Atlantic. Only the outbreak of civil war in Massachusetts in the spring of 1775 finally made it clear to colonial leaders that their hope for reconciliation might be an illusion. Even then it took more than a year of bloodshed to convince the members of the Continental Congress that they had no alternative left but to declare independence.

“No Stamp Act” teapot. Although the anticipated cost to colonists was slight, many colonial leaders considered the Stamp Act duties to be extremely dangerous to their political liberties, because for American colonists to submit to taxation without representation was to accept an essentially limitless British authority over their lives and estates. This ceramic teapot protesting the Stamp Act was produced in England for American customers—a testimony to both the vital economic life of the transatlantic empire and to the integration of the colonies in British political culture. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

With the unmistakable clarity of a lightning flash, the Stamp Act crisis revealed that two quite different ideas of the empire, and how it should function, had emerged in the postwar empire. One was an imperial vision of unity and integration, in which a sovereign king-in-Parliament directed the energies of all British subjects toward a common end by the wise, benevolent exercise of supreme power. Such a model began with the assumption that the purpose of empire was to create order, applying the power of the state to promote prosperity and create harmony (or at least to prevent destructive competition) among the various groups that constituted it. In such an imperium there would be room for a broad, diverse range of inherently unequal subjects, all of them living together under the protection of a crown to which all were equally loyal. Heathen Indians in the interior, Francophone Catholics in Canada and Louisiana, German Pietists in Pennsylvania, English and Scots and Scotch-Irish Protestants, even Africans, all had a place in the empire, provided they submitted to the authority of the king and his representatives. This was an empire based on the assumptions of subordination that had brought Scotland into union with England and Wales to create the United Kingdom, in 1707—a union enforced by British military power in the suppression of the Scottish rebellions of 1715 and 1745. This was an empire as General Braddock and Lord Loudoun had construed it, and the colonists cared no more for it in the postwar era than they had in 1755-1757.

As opposed to this unitary conception, the second model assumed that the empire was in essence a great community of white, Protestant, English-speaking subjects who shared the same rights and avowed a common allegiance, no matter whether they lived in the Shenandoah Valley or the Vale of Kent. Because their rights as subjects came first, the power of the British state over its colonies was contingent upon their consent, expressed through the acts and deliberations of elected representatives, irrespective of whether they sat in Westminster as members of Parliament or in Williamsburg as burgesses. Because common allegiance to the king and a common Protestant identity bound them together, constitutional arguments based on the dangers of divided sovereignty made no emotional sense to the colonists; it was their own freely offered consent, not some legal technicality, that made their assemblies equal to the House of Commons in privileges and authority.

This conception of empire mirrored the assumptions that connected England and Ireland, in which a royally appointed lord lieutenant represented the king to a colony whose Parliament represented the interests of its freeholders. It was an empire that amounted to a confederation of colonies, where English-speaking Protestants composed a transnational political community that ruled over local minorities just as in Ireland the English-speaking Protestant Ascendancy (backed, as needed, by royal troops) ruled over the never-to-be-enfranchised Irish Catholics. This vision of empire had been effectively realized in 1758-1760, when Pitt treated Americans as allies and asked for their support rather than seeking to compel it. The Reverend Jonathan Mayhew had painted the future glories of an empire conceived on such terms in the most vivid possible way when he preached his sermons on the conquest of Quebec in 1759.

Whether the empire was unitary or confederated; whether its basis lay in the indivisible sovereignty of king-in-Parliament or the universal exercise of Englishmen’s rights; whether what held it together was state power or voluntary affiliation; whether its fundamental goal was the creation of order or the enjoyment of liberty: these were the issues at stake as American and metropolitan Britons debated the nature of the imperial community in the Stamp Act crisis and the decade of on-and-off crises that followed it. What ultimately drove these debates from disagreements expressed in words and pamphlets to sterner disputes conducted with powder and ball were concerns for the future. What made them irreconcilable, in the end, was the knowledge that the empire’s future would be worked out in the interior of the continent, on lands freed from the grip of the tyrant king of France in the most successful war Britain had ever fought.