Produced by Al Haines
THE WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
BY
T. C. SMITH
PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN WILLIAMS
COLLEGE, WILLIAMSTOWN MASS., U.S.A.
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For its Index, a page number has been placed
only at the start of that section.]
First printed 1914/15.
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PREFACE
The purpose of this volume is to show how social, economic, and
political causes led to a period of almost continuous antagonism
between England and the American communities from 1763 to the
ratification of the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, and how that antagonism
was ended. The war of American Independence, 1775-1783, and the war of
1812-1815 give their names to the book, not because of their military
or naval importance, but because they mark, in each case, the outcome
of successive years of unavailing efforts on the part of each country
to avoid bloodshed. With this aim in view, no more detailed study of
the internal political history or institutions of either country can be
included than is necessary to account for different political habits;
nor can the events of diplomatic history be developed beyond what is
called for to explain persistent lines of action or the conclusion of a
significant treaty.
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CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE ELEMENTS OF ANTAGONISM, 1763 . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
II THE CONTEST OVER PARLIAMENTARY TAXATION, 1763-1773 . . . 28
III THE DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE, 1773-1776 . . . . . . . . . 51
IV THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EMPIRE, 1776-1778 . . . . . . . . . 75
V FRENCH INTERVENTION AND BRITISH FAILURE, 1778-1781 . . . 96
VI BRITISH PARTIES AND AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 1778-1783 . . 114
VII THE FORMATION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1781-1793 . . . . . . 129
VIII THE FIRST PERIOD OF COMMERCIAL ANTAGONISM, 1783-1795 . . 149
IX THE TRIUMPH OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1795-1805 169
X THE SECOND PERIOD OF COMMERCIAL ANTAGONISM, 1805-1812 . . 189
XI THE WAR FOR "SAILORS' RIGHTS" AND WESTWARD
EXPANSION, 1812-1815 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
XII END OF THE ANTAGONISM: A CENTURY OF PEACE . . . . . . . . 236
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
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THE WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE ELEMENTS OF ANTAGONISM, 1763
In 1763, by the Peace of Paris, England won a position of unapproached
supremacy in colonial possessions and in naval strength. The entire
North American continent east of the Mississippi River was now under
the British flag, and four West India sugar islands were added to those
already in English hands. In India, the rivalry of the French was
definitely crushed and the control of the revenues and fortunes of the
native potentates was transferred to the East India Company. Guided by
the genius of Pitt, British armies had beaten French in Germany and
America, and British fleets had conquered French and Spanish with
complete ease. The power of the Empire seemed beyond challenge. Yet
within this Empire itself there lay already the seeds of a discord
which was soon {10} to develop into an irrepressible contest, leading
to civil war; then, for a generation, to drive the separated parts into
renewed antagonism, and finally to cause a second war. Between the
North American colonies and the mother country there existed such
moral, political, and economic divergence that nothing but prudent and
patient statesmanship on both sides of the Atlantic could prevent
disaster.
The fundamental source of antagonism lay in the fact that the thirteen
colonies had developed a wholly different social and political life
from that of the mother country. Originally, the prevailing ideas and
habits of the colonists and of the Englishmen who remained at home had
been substantially the same. In England, as in America, the gentry and
middle classes played a leading part during the years from 1600 to
1660. But by 1763 England, under the Hanoverian kings, had become a
state where all political and social power had been gathered into the
hands of a landed aristocracy which dominated the government, the
Church, and the professions. In parliament, the House of Commons--once
the body which reflected the conscious strength of the gentry and
citizens,--had now fallen under the control of the peers, owing to the
decayed condition of scores of ancient parliamentary boroughs. Nearly
one-third of the seats were actually {11} or substantially owned by
noblemen, and of the remainder a majority were venal, the close
corporations of Mayor and Aldermen selling freely their right to return
two members at each parliamentary election. In addition, the influence
and prestige of the great landowners were so powerful that even in the
counties, and in those boroughs where the number of electors was
considerable, none but members of the ruling class sought election. So
far as the members of the middle class were concerned--the merchants,
master weavers, iron producers, and craftsmen,--they were strong in
wealth and their wishes counted heavily with the aristocracy in all
legislation of a financial or commercial nature; but of actual part in
the government they had none. As for the lower classes,--the
labourers, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers,--they were able as a rule
to influence government only by rioting and uproar. Without the
ballot, they had no other way.
Owing to the personal weakness of successive monarchs since the death
of William III, there had grown up the cabinet system of government
which, in 1763, meant the reduction of the King to the position of an
honorary figurehead and the actual control of officers, perquisites,
patronage, and preferment, as well as the direction of public policy,
by the leaders of parliamentary groups. The King was {12} obliged to
select his ministers from among the members of noble families in the
Lords or Commons, who agreed among themselves after elaborate bargains
and negotiations upon the formation of cabinets and the distribution of
honours. In this way sundry great Whig family "connections," as they
were called, had come to monopolize political power, excluding Tories,
or adherents of the Stuarts, and treating government as solely a matter
of aristocratic concern. Into this limited circle, a poor man could
rise only by making himself useful through his talents or his eloquence
to one of the ruling cliques, and the goal of his career was naturally
a peerage.
The weakness of this system of government by family connection lay in
its thorough dependence upon customs of patronage and perquisite. The
public offices were heavily burdened with lucrative sinecures, which
were used in the factional contests to buy support in Parliament, as
were also peerages, contracts, and money bribes. When George III
ascended the throne, in 1760, he found the most powerful Minister in
the Cabinet to be the Duke of Newcastle, whose sole qualification,
apart from his birth, was his pre-eminent ability to handle patronage
and purchase votes. That such a system did not ruin England was due to
the tenacity and personal courage of this aristocracy and to {13} its
use of parliamentary methods, whereby the orderly conduct of
legislation and taxation and the habit of public attack and defence of
government measures furnished political training for the whole ruling
class. Further, the absence of any sharp caste lines made it possible
for them to turn, in times of crisis, to such strong-fibred and
masterful commoners as Walpole and Pitt, each of whom, in his way,
saved the country from the incompetent hands of titled ministries.
This system, moreover, rested in 1763 on the aquiescence of practically
all Englishmen. It was accepted by middle and lower classes alike as
normal and admirable; and only a small body of radicals felt called
upon to criticize the exclusion of the mass of taxpayers from a share
in the government. Pitt, in Parliament, was ready to proclaim a
national will as something distinct from the voice of the
borough-owners, but he had few followers. Only in London and a few
counties did sundry advocates of parliamentary reform strive in the
years after 1763 to emphasize these views by organizing the freemen to
petition and to "instruct" their representatives in the Commons. Such
desires evoked nothing but contempt and antipathy in the great majority
of Englishmen. Especially when they became audible in the mouths of
rioters did they appear revolutionary and {14} obnoxious to the lovers
of peace, good order, and the undisturbed collection of rents and
taxes. Nothing but a genuine social revolution could bring such ideas
to victory and that, in 1763, lay very far in the future. For the time
conservatism reigned supreme.
In the thirteen colonies, on the other hand, the communities of
middle-class Englishmen who emigrated in the seventeenth century had
developed nothing resembling a real aristocracy. Social distinctions,
modelled on those of the old country, remained between the men of large
wealth--such as the great landed proprietors in New York and the
planters in the South, or the successful merchants in New England and
the Middle colonies--and the small farmers, shopkeepers, and fishermen,
who formed the bulk of the population; while all of these joined in
regarding the outlying frontiersmen as elements of society deserving of
small consideration. Men of property, education, and "position"
exercised a distinct leadership in public and private life. Yet all
this remained purely social; in law no such thing as an aristocracy
could be found, and in government the colonies had grown to be very
nearly republican. Here lay the fundamental distinction between the
England and the America of 1763. In America, a title or peerage
conferred no political rights {15} whatever; these were founded in
every case on law, on a royal charter or a royal commission which
established a frame of government, and were based on moderate property
qualifications which admitted a majority of adult males to the suffrage
and to office.
In every colony the government consisted of a governor, a council, and
an assembly representing the freemen. This body, by charter, or royal
instructions, had the full right to impose taxes and vote laws; and,
although its acts were liable to veto by the governor, or by the Crown
through the Privy Council, it possessed the actual control of political
power. This it derived immediately from its constituents and not from
any patrons, lords, or close corporations. Representation and the
popular will were, in fact, indissolubly united.
The governor in two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, was chosen
by the freemen. Elsewhere, he was appointed by an outside authority:
in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland by the hereditary proprietor to
whom the charter had been granted, in all other colonies by the Crown.
The councillors, who commonly exercised judicial functions in addition
to their duties as the governor's advisers and as the upper house of
the legislature, were appointed in all colonies except the three in New
England; {16} and they were chosen in all cases from among the socially
prominent colonists. The judges, also, were appointed by the governor;
and they, with governor and council, were supposed to represent the
home government in the colonies.
But in reality there was no effective imperial control. The Crown, it
is true, appeared to have large powers. It granted charters,
established provinces by commissions, exercised the right to annul laws
and hear appeals from colonial decisions, exacted reports from
governors, sent instructions, and made appointments and removals at
will. But nearly all the colonial officials, except the few customs
officers, were paid out of colonial appropriations, and this one fact
sufficed to deprive them of any independent position. In nearly every
colony, the assembly, in the course of two-thirds of a century of
incessant petty conflict, of incessant wrangling and bargaining, of
incessant encroachments on the nominal legal powers of the governor,
had made itself master of the administration. The colonists resisted
all attempts to direct their military or civil policy, laid only such
taxes as they chose, raised only such troops as they saw fit, passed
only such laws as seemed to them desirable, and tied the governor's
hands by every sort of device. They usurped the {17} appointment of
the colonial treasurer, they appointed committees to oversee the
expenditure of sums voted, they systematically withheld a salary from
the governor, in order to render him dependent upon annual "presents,"
liable to diminution or termination in case he did not satisfy the
assembly's wishes. The history of the years from 1689 to 1763 is a
chronicle of continual defeat for governors who were obliged to see one
power after another wrenched away from them. Under the circumstances,
the political life of the thirteen colonies was practically republican
in character, and was as marked for its absence of administrative
machinery as the home government was for its aristocracy and
centralization.
Another feature of colonial life tended to accentuate this difference.
Although religion had ceased to be a political question, and the
English Church was no longer regarded, save in New England, as
dangerous to liberty, the fact that the great majority of the colonists
were dissenters--Congregational, Presbyterian, or Reformed, with a
considerable scattering of Baptists and other sects--had an effect on
the attitude of the people toward England. In the home country, the
controlling social classes accepted the established church as part of
the constitution; but in the colonies it had small {18} strength, and
even where it was by law established it remained little more than an
official body, the "Governor's church." This tended to widen the gap
between the political views of the individualistic dissenting and
Puritan sects in the colonies and the people at home.
The American of 1763 was thus a different kind of man from the
Englishman. As a result of the divergent development on the two sides
of the Atlantic from a common ancestry, their political habits had
become mutually incomprehensible. To the Englishman, the rule of the
nobility was normal--the ideal political system. He was content, if a
commoner, with the place assigned to him. To the colonist, on the
other hand, government in which the majority of adult male inhabitants
possessed the chief power was the only valid form,--all others were
vicious. Patriotism meant two contradictory things. The Englishman's
patriotism was sturdy but unenthusiastic, and showed itself almost as
much in a contempt for foreigners as in complacency over English
institutions. The colonist, on the contrary, had a double allegiance:
one conventional and traditional, to the British crown; the other a
new, intensely local and narrow attachment to his province. England
was still the "old home," looked to as the source of political
authority, of manners and literature. It was for many of {19} the
residents their recent abode and, for all except a few of Dutch,
German, or French extraction, their ancestral country. But already
this "loyalty" on the part of the colonists was dwindling into
something more sentimental than real. The genuine local patriotism of
the colonists was shown by their persistent struggle against the
representatives of English authority in the governors' chairs. There
had developed in America a new sort of man, an "American," who wished
to be as independent of government as possible, and who, while
professing and no doubt feeling a general loyalty to England, was in
fact a patriot of his own colony.
The colonists entered very slightly into the thoughts of the English
noblemen and gentry. They were regarded in a highly practical way,
without a trace of any sentiment, as members of the middle and lower
classes, not without a large criminal admixture, who had been helped
and allowed to build up some unruly and not very admirable communities.
Nor did the English middle classes look upon the colonists with much
interest, or regard them as, on the whole, their equals. The
prevailing colonial political habits, as seen from England, suggested
only unwarrantable wrangling indicative of political incompetence and a
spirit of disobedience. Loyalty, to an {20} Englishman, meant
submission to the law. To men trained in such different schools, words
did not mean the same thing. The time had come when the two peoples
were scarcely able to understand each other.
A second cause for antagonism, scarcely less fundamental and destined
to cause equal irritation, is to be found in the conflict between the
economic life of the American communities and the beliefs of the mother
country concerning commercial and naval policy. Great Britain, in
1763, was predominantly a trading country. Its ships carried goods for
all the nations of Europe and brought imports to England from all
lands. Although the manufacturers were not yet in possession of the
new inventions which were to revolutionize the industries of the world,
they were active and prosperous in their domestic production of
hardware and textiles, and they furnished cargoes for the shipowners to
transport to all quarters. To these two great interests of the middle
classes, banking and finance were largely subsidiary. Agriculture, the
mainstay of the nobility and gentry, continued to hold first place in
the interests of the governing classes, but the importance of all
sources of wealth was fully recognized.
In the colonies, on the contrary, manufacture scarcely existed beyond
the domestic {21} production of articles for local use; and the
inhabitants relied on importations for nearly all finished commodities
and for all luxuries. Their products were chiefly things which Great
Britain could not itself raise, such as sugar in the West Indies;
tobacco from the islands and the southern mainland colonies; indigo and
rice from Carolina; furs, skins, masts, pine products; and, from New
England, above all, fish. The natural market for these articles was in
England or in other colonies; and in return British manufactures found
their natural market in the new communities. When the Economic
Revolution transformed industry, and factories, driven by steam, made
England the workshop of the world, the existing tendency for her to
supply America with manufactured products was intensified regardless of
the political separation of the two countries. Not until later
economic changes supervened was this normal relationship altered.
The traditional British policy in 1763 was that of the so-called
Mercantile System, which involved a thoroughgoing application of the
principle of protection to the British shipowner, manufacturer, and
corn-grower against any competition. An elaborate tariff, with a
system of prohibitions and bounties, attempted to prevent the landowner
from being undersold by foreign corn, and the {22} manufacturer from
meeting competition from foreign producers. Navigation Acts shut out
foreign-built, -owned, or -manned ships from the carrying trade between
any region but their home country and England, reserving all other
commerce for British vessels. Into this last restriction there entered
another purely political consideration, namely, the perpetuation of a
supply of mariners for the British navy, whose importance was fully
recognized. So far as the colonies were concerned, they were brought
within the scope of mercantilist ideas by being considered as sources
of supply for England in products not possible to raise at home, as
markets which must be reserved for British manufacturers and traders,
and as places which must not be allowed to develop any rivalry to
British producers. Furthermore, they were so situated that by proper
regulations they might serve to encourage British shipping even if this
involved an economic loss.
The Navigation Acts accordingly, from 1660 to 1763, were designed to
put this theory into operation, and excluded all foreign vessels from
trading with the colonies, prohibited any trade to the colonies except
from British ports and enumerated certain commodities--sugar, cotton,
dye woods, indigo, rice, furs--which could be sent only to England. To
ensure the carrying out of these {23} laws, an elaborate system of
bonds and local duties was devised, and customs officers were
appointed, resident in the colonies, while governors were obliged to
take oath to enforce the Acts. As time revealed defects or unnecessary
stringencies, the restrictions were frequently modified. The
Carolinas, for instance, were allowed to ship rice not only to England,
but to any place in Europe south of Cape Finisterre. Bounties were
established to aid the production of tar and turpentine; but special
Acts prohibited the export of hats from the colonies, or the
manufacture of rolled iron, in order to check a possible source of
competition to British producers. In short, the Board of Trade, the
administrative body charged with the oversight of the plantations,
devoted its energies to suggesting devices which should aid the
colonists, benefit the British consumer and producer, and increase
"navigation."
It does not appear that the Acts of Trade were, in general, a source of
loss to the colonies. Their vessels shared in the privileges reserved
for British-built ships. The compulsory sending of the enumerated
commodities to England may have damaged the tobacco-growers; but in
other respects it did little harm. The articles would have gone to
England in any case. The restriction of importation to goods from
England was no {24} great grievance, since British products would, in
any case, have supplied the American market. Even the effort, by an
Act of 1672, to check intercolonial trade in enumerated commodities was
not oppressive, for, with one exception noted below, there was no great
development of such a trade. By 1763, according to the best evidence,
the thirteen colonies seem to have adjusted their habits to the
Navigation Acts, and to have been carrying on their flourishing
commerce within these restrictions.
To this general condition, however, there were some slight exceptions,
and one serious one. The colonists undoubtedly resented the necessity
of purchasing European products from English middlemen, and were
especially desirous of importing Spanish and Portuguese wines and
French brandies directly. Smuggling in these articles seems to have
been steadily carried on. Much more important--and to the American
ship-owners the kernel of the whole matter--was the problem of the West
India trade. It was proved, as the eighteenth century progressed, that
the North American colonies could balance their heavy indebtedness to
the mother country for excess of imports over exports only by selling
to the French, as well as the British West Indies, barrel staves,
clapboards, fish and food products. In {25} return, they took sugar
and molasses, developing in New England a flourishing rum manufacture,
which in turn was used in the African slave trade. By these means the
people of the New England and Middle colonies built up an active
commerce, using their profits to balance their indebtedness to England.
This "triangular trade" disturbed the British West India planters, who,
being largely non-residents and very influential in London, induced
Parliament, in 1733, to pass an Act imposing prohibitory duties on all
sugar and molasses of foreign growth. This law, if enforced, would
have struck a damaging blow at the prosperity of the Northern colonies,
merely to benefit the West India sugar-growers by giving them a
monopoly; but the evidence goes to show that it was systematically
evaded and that French sugar, together with French and Portuguese
wines, was still habitually smuggled into the colonies. Thus the
Navigation Acts, in the only points where they would have been actually
oppressive, were not enforced. The colonial governors saw the serious
consequences and shrank from arousing discontent. It is significant
that the same colonists who contended with the royal governors did not
hesitate to violate a parliamentary law when it ran counter to their
interests.
The only reason why the radical difference {26} between the colonies
and the home government did not cause open conflict long before 1763 is
to be found in the absorption of the English ministries in
parliamentary manoeuvring at home, diplomacy, and European wars. The
weakness of the imperial control was recognized and frequently
complained of by governors, Boards of Trade, and other officials; but
so long as the colonies continued to supply the sugar, furs, lumber and
masts called for by the Acts, bought largely from English shippers and
manufacturers, and stimulated the growth of British shipping, the Whig
and Tory noblemen were content. The rapidly growing republicanism of
the provincial and proprietary governments was ignored and allowed to
develop unchecked. A half-century of complaints from thwarted
governors, teeming with suggestions that England ought to take the
government of the colonies into its own hands, produced no results
beyond creating in official circles an opinion unfavourable to the
colonists.
In the years of the French war, 1754-1760, the utter incompatibility
between imperial theories on the one hand and colonial political habits
on the other, could no longer be disregarded. In the midst of the
struggle, the legislatures continued to wrangle with governors over
points of privilege; they were slow to vote supplies; they were {27}
dilatory in raising troops; they hung back from a jealous fear that
their neighbour colonies might fail to do their share; they were ready
to let British soldiers do all the hard fighting. Worse still, the
colonial shipowners persisted in their trade with the French and
Spanish West Indies, furnishing their enemies with supplies, and buying
their sugar and molasses as usual. When, in Boston, writs of
assistance were employed by the customs officials, in order that by a
general power of search they might discover such smuggled property, the
merchants protested in the courts, and James Otis, a fiery young
lawyer, boldly declared the writs an infringement of the rights of the
colonists, unconstitutional, and beyond the power of Parliament to
authorize. To Ministers engaged in a tremendous war for the overthrow
of France, the behaviour of the colonies revealed a spirit scarcely
short of disloyalty, and a weakness of government no longer to be
tolerated. The Secretaries, the Board of Trade, the customs officials,
army officers, naval commanders, colonial governors, and judges all
agreed that the time had come for a thorough and drastic reform. They
approached the task purely and simply as members of the English
governing classes, ignorant of the colonists' political ideas and
totally indifferent to their views; and their measures were framed in
the spirit {28} of unquestioning acceptance of the principles of the
Acts of Trade as a fundamental national policy.