Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution - Hardcover

Slaughter, Thomas P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809058340 ISBN 13: 9780809058341

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2014

Synopsis

An important new interpretation of the American colonists' 150-year struggle to achieve independence

"What do we mean by the Revolution?" John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson in 1815. "The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it." As the distinguished historian Thomas P. Slaughter shows in this landmark book, the long process of revolution reached back more than a century before 1776, and it touched on virtually every aspect of the colonies' laws, commerce, social structures, religious sentiments, family ties, and political interests. And Slaughter's comprehensive work makes clear that the British who chose to go to North America chafed under imperial rule from the start, vigorously disputing many of the colonies' founding charters.

When the British said the Americans were typically "independent," they meant to disparage them as lawless and disloyal. But the Americans insisted on their moral courage and political principles, and regarded their independence as a great virtue, as they regarded their love of freedom and their loyalty to local institutions. Over the years, their struggles to define this independence took many forms, and Slaughter's compelling narrative takes us from New England and Nova Scotia to New York and Pennsylvania, and south to the Carolinas, as colonists resisted unsympathetic royal governors, smuggled to evade British duties on imported goods (tea was only one of many), and, eventually, began to organize for armed uprisings.

Britain, especially after its victories over France in the 1750s, was eager to crush these rebellions, but the Americans' opposition only intensified, as did dark conspiracy theories about their enemies―whether British, Native American, or French.

In Independence, Slaughter resets and clarifies the terms in which we may understand this remarkable evolution, showing how and why a critical mass of colonists determined that they could not be both independent and subject to the British Crown. By 1775–76, they had become revolutionaries―going to war only reluctantly, as a last-ditch means to preserve the independence that they cherished as a birthright.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas P. Slaughter is the author of The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (Hill and Wang, 2008) and four other books. He is the Arthur R. Miller Professor at the University of Rochester and the editor of Reviews in American History.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

BORDERLANDS

 

BY THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, both French and English fishermen were working the waters around Cape Breton, or Île Royale, today part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and trading with the Abenaki and Micmac peoples who had lived and fished there for centuries.2 Norse or Viking, possibly Irish, and other European fishermen and explorers had also frequented the region for hundreds of years. The Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto, also known as John Cabot, passed that way in the fifteenth century; the English captain Charles Leigh recorded making landfall in 1597 along the Atlantic coast at a place whose first French name acknowledged his discovery, Havre à L’Anglois (English Harbor); and Samuel de Champlain at least passed it as he headed south.

By the early seventeenth century, the treacherous six-to-eight-week crossings of the Atlantic to these parts had already become part of maritime lore. “I have been to Canada seven times,” wrote one French captain, “and I venture to state that the most favorable of those voyages gave me more white hairs than all those that I have made elsewhere. It is a continual torment for mind and body.” Another Frenchman admitted his fear of sailing “over the unstable sea, every moment within two fingers of death [à deux doigts de la morte], as the saying goes.” He was mindful of the “muttering, snorting, whistling, howling, storming, rumbling” seas that lifted the ships “aloft upon mountains of water, and thence down as it were into the most profound depths of the world.” But the French and English kept coming for the fish, furs, land, adventure, independence, and wealth that they imagined awaiting them.

French explorers and fur traders founded Port Royal, a post on the Bay of Fundy coast of what we now call Nova Scotia, in 1605. That was less than two years before the first colonists landed at Jamestown, Virginia, establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America, and three years before the French founded another outpost at Quebec. And men from the two nations started fighting almost immediately. Virginia was nine hundred miles away from l’Acadie, as the French called their territory, but that was too close, and the continent of North America was too small, at nine million square miles, for the French and English to coexist peacefully. From the early 1600s through the middle of the eighteenth century, the islands and peninsulas of what we now call the Canadian Maritimes—New Brunswick, l’Acadie (Nova Scotia), Cape Breton Island, Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), and Placentia (Newfoundland)—were a borderland, the front line of conflict between the French and English in the New World.

The French abandoned Port Royal in 1607 rather than winter there. It was difficult to recruit traders and trappers, never mind settlers, and its promoters had to agree to some Huguenots (French Protestants) along with the Catholics, who said they would give it another try in 1610. Both groups survived only because the Micmacs suffered their presence, sustained them with trade, and created enduring connections based on intermarriage—all on the Indians’ terms. Beginning in 1611, when the first two Jesuits arrived in New France, there were actually more conflicts between the missionaries and the men at the trading posts than either had with the Indians. During the winter of 1612–1613, when no supplies arrived from France, the trappers had to disperse to live with the Micmacs in their hunting camps. In the spring, a French ship removed the troublesome Jesuits and took them down the coast of what is now Maine to Mount Desert Island. There men under the command of Samuel Argall—an English pirate who had a commission from the governor of Jamestown to drive out the French—attacked and captured the Jesuits, and, in November 1613, with the help of a Jesuit guide, went on to plunder Port Royal. That effectively ended France’s first settlement in the New World, but in 1608 the French explorer Samuel de Champlain had founded a settlement he called Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, and so the French maintained footholds on the North American continent with their scattered outposts even after abandoning Port Royal to the English.

The French were colonizing North America at precisely the same time as the English were, and this was no coincidence: They did it to challenge the English and establish Catholic settlements in the face of English Protestant ones, and as one front line in the commercial and military warfare that punctuated the creation of the two empires competing with each other and with the Spanish and Dutch. At its peak in 1712, New France stretched from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, a vast territory divided into five colonies—Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Louisiana. New France was always sparsely populated and financially modest in comparison to the English colonies on the mainland of North America.

In 1629, about seventy Scottish Presbyterians landed at the former Port Royal and established a trading mission. “We eat lobsters as big as little children,” one of them raved, “plenty of salmons and salmon trouts, birds of strange and diverse kinds, hawks of all sorts, doves, turtles, pheasants, partridges, black birds, a kind also of hens, wild turkeys, cranes, herons, infinite store of geese, and three or four kinds of ducks, snipes, cormorants, and many sea fouls, whales, seals, castors [beavers], [and] otters.” They, too, got along fine with the ever-flexible Micmac. Nonetheless, the Scottish enterprise failed and, in 1632, an Anglo-French treaty returned l’Acadie and Quebec to France.

The Micmacs, small bands and family groups rather than a unified tribe, were the principal Indian occupants of what is now Nova Scotia, and apparently they never numbered more than three thousand souls spread over the fifty thousand square miles that included what we now call New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the southern part of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. They ranged in concert with the seasons. January brought them to the seacoast to fish for smelt and cod, and to hunt walruses and seals. In February and March they moved inland to hunt beaver, moose, and bear. From April through October, they were back at the seaside villages, where they gathered shellfish, lobster, crabs, and eels, as well as migratory wildfowl in the spring and fall; between July and September they picked nuts, berries, and dry roots. As winter approached, they broke into smaller units to hunt and fish before beginning the annual cycle again in January.

Lines of authority in Micmac bands were vague and variable. Women gathered, cooked, and cared for children, who, unlike those of the European settlers, were not subject to corporal discipline. Men hunted and fished in season, and occasionally waged war on each other, on the Abenaki who lived south of them in what is now Maine, or on the French and English. They were not used to cooperating beyond the level of the band and so battled in small groups with limited aims and without coordinated strategy. They lived in an active spiritual world—surrounded by animal and human manitous (spirits), and ever conscious of their individual and collective ginap (spiritual power). Their shamans easily accepted and used Catholic artifacts—crosses and rosary beads—and adopted Catholic rituals like communion, with its wafers and holy water. The Catholic missionaries tolerated this syncretistic spirituality, realizing they could not expunge native ceremonies and beliefs. When Puritans came to these parts, however, they saw the lives of the Indians around them as being in sharp contrast with their own—with their Christian faith and their conflicted relationship to the earthbound world, against which they were at constant war—against animals and plants, the native people, even their own inherent natures.

Micmac beliefs in the three souls of each being—the life soul, brain soul, and free soul—prepared them for the trinitarian concepts taught by the Catholic missionaries. They believed that the life soul dies when the body dies, that death of the brain soul leaves one witless, and that the free soul roams in life, in death, and in dreams. Unlike the Puritans, they accepted the natural world as it was, adapting themselves to its demands rather than trying to alter it. They had no interest in visiting Europe, in learning to manufacture the items they purchased or received as gifts from the French and English, or in changing their ways in emulation of them. The French, whom they encountered in smaller numbers than the English, became the Micmacs’ natural allies; they agreed to pay “rent” on the land and were more generous gift givers than the impecunious New Englanders.

A French ship brought women and children to Port Royal for the first time in 1636, making it a true colony rather than just a trading outpost. These immigrants became the first genuine Acadians. By 1650, the fifty French families who lived, hunted, trapped, farmed, and fished there were developing a distinctive culture bound not only by their shared experiences in the New World but also by kinship. They remained as vulnerable as ever, though, and in 1654, when Oliver Cromwell’s government in London commissioned Major Robert Sedgwick, in Boston, to attack New Amsterdam (soon to become New York) as part of its war against the Dutch Republic, Sedgwick seized the opportunity to attack Port Royal instead, even though it had nothing at all to do with the Dutch. Perhaps the best explanation for this unexpected action is that Sedgwick’s son-in-law, the future Massachusetts governor Captain John Leverett, had invested in the Maine-Acadia trade, and, as Leverett explained to London officials, the expedition’s goal was to enlarge Great Britain’s “dominions in these western American parts.” True enough; any old excuse to invade French settlements furthered the interests of New England traders and their London counterparts.

A three-day siege of Port Royal ended in French surrender. The victorious New Englanders seized booty estimated to value £10,000 and captured 220 French soldiers. Boston declared “a public and solemn thanksgiving to the Lord for his gracious working.” Sedgwick offered Acadians a choice between being shipped back to France with their troops or continuing on their farms “unmolested,” with “liberty of conscience allowed to religion,” a concession that reflected the invaders’ greater interest in commerce than in souls. The Acadians chose to keep their farms in 1654. Under English rule, in comparative isolation and thus independent of France and the Catholic Church, a distinctive Acadian creole culture was beginning to form, an amalgam of Catholic and Huguenot French, Micmac, English, Irish, and even some Spanish influences.

Sixteen years later, in 1670, France regained Port Royal in a diplomatic exchange for some British territorial concessions in the West Indies, a bargain that angered New Englanders, who believed they had captured the prize on their own initiative and were safer without a French military presence in Nova Scotia. A high birthrate among Acadians (six to seven children per woman), peaceful relations with the Indians, a generally healthful climate, and an absence of epidemic disease contributed to the colony’s growth from about five hundred in 1670 to fifteen hundred by the end of the century.

The fortunes of the Micmacs rose and fell with those of the French Acadians, no matter how delicately the Indians approached their diplomacy with the Europeans. The Micmacs were seldom united and could not muster more than eight hundred warriors even if they had acted in concert. Yet they were perceived as a threat by the colonists, as a potential makeweight between the two perennial European enemies and as a genuine force as long as the French and English had only small and scattered outposts that were weakly defended. The Indians continued to mount successful raids on English settlements for another half century, killing eight and capturing fourteen at Dartmouth in 1750, taking scalps outside Halifax in 1756 and 1757, raiding Lunenburg in 1758—and making peace only in 1761.

*   *   *

Joint-stock companies, precursors of modern corporations, played a significant role in the founding of English colonies in North America. Although joint-stock ventures were not new to England in the seventeenth century, the frequency of their creation then and the large size of their financial undertakings in a comparatively poor island nation suggested the grand ambitions England had for empire and trade. The British East India Company, granted a royal charter in 1600 and founded in 1610, was created by London businessmen pooling their resources to enter the Asian spice trade. King James I founded the Plymouth Company in 1606, to minimize the government’s risk in establishing colonies in North America. The Virginia Company, which founded Jamestown, was another from the same era. In 1620, the original Plymouth Company was resurrected as the Plymouth Council for New England with forty investors or “patentees.”

The settlers of Plymouth Colony in New England were, technically, employees of the Virginia Company to begin with. About half the original group were Separatists from the Church of England, who had founded their own church, a decision that made them vulnerable to prosecution for treason. They fled first from the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, then from Boston, in Lincolnshire, and thence to a more tolerant haven in the Netherlands. In Holland they felt culturally alienated and worried about the fate of their children in a foreign land, so they immigrated again, this time to North America. The Pilgrims, as we know them, agreed to pay the Virginia Company for their passage with fish, furs, and lumber that they would harvest when they reached Virginia, but storms blew their ship, the Mayflower, off course and they landed, in 1620, on what is today Cape Cod. There they occupied a Pokanoket Indian village with cleared fields that the Indians had abandoned during a recent devastating epidemic of smallpox. Half of the 102 Pilgrims died during their first winter from hunger, exposure, and disease, but by 1630 the colony had grown to fifteen hundred people and was thriving.

A decade after the Plymouth settlement, and at about the same time that women and children first arrived in Port Royal, John Dane, a tailor and one of the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, another joint-stock venture, said that he had “bent myself to come to New England, thinking that I should be more free here than there from temptations.” Dane, like others who made the Atlantic crossing to Massachusetts during the 1630s, fled what they believed to be a diluted religion and a corrupt government, and they founded independent communities based on strict Calvinist principles. They wanted to establish villages of like-minded “saints,” free of strangers and nonbelievers. This was decidedly not a heterogeneous population that could worship or not as it saw fit: Other dissenters from Anglo-Catholicism (especially Baptists and Quakers), Catholics, Anglicans themselves, and the unchurched had “free liberty to keep away from us.”

Large Puritan migrations in the 1630s brought about fourteen thousand more immigrants, principally from the east coast of England—East Anglia, eastern Lincolnshire, eastern Cambridge, and northeast Kent.3 They left a land of martyrs, not just believers: More than 80 percent of the Protestants burned at the stake during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553–1558), daughter of Henry VIII, had come fro...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0809058340
• ISBN 13: 9780809058341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 487