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CHAPTER 1

Living on the Edge of Empire

I

To our eyes, if we could see it, the land as it was then would look empty. The rivers and harbors and mountains and plains would be recognizable enough, but where, we would ask, are the people? In 1763, fewer than three million people inhabited the whole thirteen provinces from Georgia to New Hampshire. They lived in places whose names we still use. Boston was a town of 15,000 perched on a peninsula whose only link to the mainland was a narrow spit. The 22,000 people of New York City were crammed into the area that the financial district now occupies, with the rest of Manhattan, and all of Queens, Kings, Staten Island, and northern New Jersey lying almost empty around them. Philadelphia was somewhat bigger, despite its being the newest of the major towns, but only by a few thousand people. Charleston's population was of the same order, and places like Salem, Hartford, Baltimore, and Savannah were little more than villages. North America had nothing to compare with the great cities of the Old World. Nor could it boast any town that even faintly resembled Lima or Mexico City in population, sophistication, wealth, or poverty.

It was more than coincidence that the major towns were of roughly the same size, for they occupied roughly the same position in the world of their time. Each was a capital, where men who wielded power made decisions that affected everyone else. Some of these men were colonials: the great landowners, prosperous merchants, and sophisticated lawyers who loom so large in most accounts of the era. Others were high British officials: peers, knights, and gentlemen serving for a time. Still others were placemen, come to the colonies to make their fortunes by inching their way up the ladder of preferment. The very makeup of this series of ruling elites, with its mixture of officials serving Britain and representatives serving their communities, all of them simultaneously serving themselves, exemplifies the situation in which the colonials lived.

But there was more than politics to make the towns similar. Each was the hub of a local economy as well as a link in a larger imperial and Atlantic network. In each, a sizable group of artisans, such as the Boston silversmith Paul Revere or the New York instrument maker John Lamb, made goods to meet the needs of their communities and of people nearby. In each, there were traders like New York's Isaac Sears, men whose small sloops and schooners plied up and down the seaboard and into the West Indies, carrying Grand Banks cod to Jamaica, Pennsylvania wheat to Charleston, Barbados molasses to New York. But in each there were merchants on a grand scale as well, men like John Hancock and Andrew Oliver of Boston, and Henry Laurens of Charleston, who sent their brigs and ships across the Atlantic. Such men were far more locked into the imperial system of credit, personal relations, law, and power than their lesser trading colleagues and the artisans. They were far more likely to be serious players at the game of Anglo-American politics as well, seeking both local office and imperial patronage.

The towns these people lived in existed to channel American goods in ways that would serve Britain's empire. Over the hundred years that had passed since Oliver Cromwell's time, successive British governments had erected a ramshackle but quite real structure of laws designed to bind the colonies into a peripheral relationship with the British metropolis. According to the Navigation Acts, there were some things the colonists had to do, such as send their most important goods only to British ports and ship all their goods only in British vessels. There were other things they were expressly forbidden to do, such as turn their sizable output of crude iron into finished goods, or sell beaver hats to one another, or buy molasses from the non-British Caribbean islands.

Admittedly, the system was leaky. Most of the Navigation Acts used stiff taxes to compel what they required. There were not many officials to collect those taxes, and often what few there were could be easily bribed. Admittedly, as well, the system conferred real benefits. It provided guaranteed markets, naval protection, and a network of credit. Since American-built ships were legally British, it stimulated the colonists to develop one of the Atlantic world's foremost shipbuilding industries. Not only ship carpenters but rope and sailmakers, blacksmiths and the chandlers who dealt in ship goods, also profited. Admittedly, in all the ports there were tendencies at work that pointed to autonomy and internal development rather than to colonial dependency. Yet the fact remained: at best, the colonials were only partially masters of their own house. The political power wielded by British officials, the economic power given shape in the Navigation Acts, and, for many, the day-to-day patterns of colonial lives bore witness to the fact that they existed to serve needs other than their own.

One sign of their colonial situation was the power of the institution of slavery. Blacks, almost all of them in bondage, formed a huge proportion of the people of the Southern colonies, where they did most of the productive labor. They also made up a good-sized minority of Northerners, including a fifth of the people of New York City. Some were simply ornamental, human evidence of a great person's wealth. But in the North and the South alike, blacks did socially necessary work. Slavery was a benefit to the masters, of course. Thomas Jefferson, who gained more from it than most, tried to include a passage in the Declaration of Independence that blamed slavery on the king. He failed. In the midst of prose that otherwise rings true, Jefferson found himself reduced to using typographical tricks and artificial emotion to make his point, and his fellow congressmen had the good sense to take them out. Yet whites in Virginia and South Carolina extorted work from blacks for the same reason that Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were extorting it from Indians, and nobles in Russia and Poland were extorting it from serfs. Slavery, like the Peruvian mita or Russian serfdom, produced primary goods for which the European metropolis was hungry. All three developed in the same matrix of natural wealth that was virtually free for the taking, unwilling labor that was driven to the task, and governments that were willing to aid in the driving. Nowhere in the Western European core was such a pattern to be found. Its presence in North America provides powerful evidence of the colonials' place in their world.

Slaves and masters were not the only Americans who lived in social relationships that reflected that colonial situation. Nineteen of every twenty whites dwelt in the countryside, not the towns. For almost all of them the great goal in life was the freehold ownership of enough land to support their families and to guarantee the future of their children. Yet, by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, that goal was becoming an impossible dream for many. In New England, especially, towns that had been sparsely populated at the start of the eighteenth century were running out of farmland by mid-century. Moreover, throughout the colonies, country people lived with the growing reality of a society based on landlordism and tenantry rather than freehold farms.

That tendency was stronger in some places than in others. In New England, it existed mostly as a fear. The Puritan settlers had distributed the land in a way that worked against any individual gaining large holdings. But as overcrowding forced their descendants off the land, they began to use the word "slave" as a synonym for "tenant." The usage reflected both their memories of the England their forebears had left behind and an awareness of how things were done in large parts of nearby New York. From there to North Carolina, tenantry was widely prevalent among farmers.

In some places, tenantry even bore faint overtones of European feudalism. There were bearers of genuine titles in the colonies: the baronet Sir William Johnson in New York's Mohawk Valley, Lord Fairfax in Virginia's Northern Neck. There were others who held their land on terms that mixed economic right and political privilege. That mixture lay at the heart of feudal social relations, whether or not a landlord had a formal title. For some, the mixture was empty: the Livingstons, the Van Cortlandts, and the Van Rensselaers of New York never exercised the right to hold "one court leet and one court baron" that their status as manorial landlords conferred. For others, it was very real: what was the whole of Pennsylvania but an enormous fief, with the governorship descending from Penn to Penn just as an earldom or a duchy might descend in Europe? For still others, the link was there, even if it was absent in law. Sir William Johnson tried and failed to have his estate of Kingsborough made into a manor, but he still controlled elections, courts, and office holding on New York's western frontier. Even the courthouse and the jail were his personal property.

But, more importantly, men whose grandfathers and grandmothers had amassed immense tracts of empty land in the seventeenth century were finding the landlord-tenant relationship a profitable way to exploit it in the eighteenth. By and large, tenantry meant the growing of wheat and the improvement of the land. By and large, landlordism meant the milling and the marketing of the wheat and the reaping of capital gains and rents. For some landlords, this blended with a vision of a stratified but nonetheless organic community. Mistress Anne Grant, a well-born young woman whose father projected an estate in the region that would become Vermont, mused on the "amiable and innocent tenants we were to have." Frederick Philipse of the Hudson Valley governed his tenants' lives but cared for their welfare as well. So did Sir William Johnson. But others ran their estates quite simply as moneymaking enterprises, with no pretense that they were in it for anything other than their own gain. Tenant labor was not serfdom, let alone slavery. But, like the growth of slavery, its rapid increase in the mid-eighteenth century reflected the fact that the colonies were subordinate parts of a far-flung empire.

There were, of course, large numbers of rural people who were simply freeholders. Some, in the deep New England interior, or on the west bank of the Hudson, or beyond the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, or in the uplands of the Southern provinces, lived almost cut off from the imperial network of power and commerce. Others, such as the prosperous farmers who dwelt near New York City and in the lower Delaware and Susquehanna valleys, were deeply enmeshed in that network. Whether they grew their crops for commerce, for subsistence, or for a mixture of the two, freehold farmers were doubtless a majority in the countryside. But they, too, lived in an empire that was run in good part from afar. When that empire's masters began to institute reforms after the Seven Years' War, colonials of all sorts would find themselves reminded forcibly of their place in the world.

II

In 1763, Britain stood supreme in North America after its final victory over France. People of many different sorts inhabited its American provinces. The woodland Indians were still a powerful force; their major links to Britain were trade, warfare, and protection. The most successful of them, such as the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, had long since mastered the art of balancing one group of whites off against another, whether the balance was French against English or English against colonials. Though settlers had forcibly pushed them back and were willing enough to enslave them if they could, North American natives had not been turned into a subordinate caste, as natives of Mexico and the Andes had been. Rather, they lived beyond the edge. Britain gave that edge a formal definition in 1763, when it established a "Proclamation Line" intended to separate the two races. The line began at Chaleur Bay, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and ran down the crest of the eastern mountains to the border between Georgia and Florida. With the French gone, it formed the Indians' main safeguard. While British might existed to enforce this boundary, there was at least a chance that the Indians could stave off white men's hunger for their land. From New York to Georgia, men who felt that hunger were organizing land companies to deal in land they nonetneless planned to acquire.

But though the names of their tribes struck fear throughout the interior, and though the "Conspiracy of Pontiac" of 1763 marked a valiant attempt to push the settlers back to where Britain said they should be, the Native Americans were already few in number. The great dying off that followed their first contact with European diseases had guaranteed that their fate was to be pushed back and finally to be herded into reservations. They would be colonized in their own way, not in the manner of Africans or South Asians. In 1776 they could still maintain the fiction that theirs were great nations, as capable of demanding respect as any nation of Europe. In the Revolutionary War they would find their last chance to play different groups of whites off against one another. But, in the end, no matter which side they chose, they would lose.

Africans in America could never maintain any such fiction. By 1776 there were already hundreds of thousands of them, and almost all were slaves. But within that common plight there was enormous variety. To be a house servant in Boston was one thing; to work on a Dutchman's farm in the Hudson Valley was another. To tend tobacco in Virginia was a third, and to grow rice in the fever-infested Carolina lowlands was a fourth. Legally, all slaves were property, living extensions of their master's will. Legally, they had no rights to the fruits of their labor, to the members of their families, or to their own bodies. Legally, they could not carry arms, or learn to read, or buy and sell, or marry. But so diverse were their experiences and their situations that no single term is broad enough to describe them. In the Revolution, they would diverge still further. A sizable minority would win freedom, but for the great majority, slavery would persist. Free blacks and slaves alike, however, found in these years their chance to take the first steps toward making themselves a people.

Diversity among whites was much greater. More than either Indians or blacks, whites lived in a world riven by gender, a world that women and men experienced in different ways. But their world was also riven by class, by religion, by language, and by region. The interplay among their many differences will be central to this book's account of their Revolution. If the word "slave" obscures the differences between a black in Boston and one near Charleston, the word "colonist" obscures those between a Puritan blacksmith in Worcester, a Dutch trader in Albany, a Scotch-Irish farmer in Carlisle, and an Anglican planter near Williamsburg. What did these people have in common?

For all that they were descended from most of the nations of Western Europe, the answer is Britishness. They may have acquired it by birth, as did the Puritans of New England and the Anglican gentry of the Tidewater, or by being conquered, as did the Dutch of New York, or by migration, as did Huguenot French, Palatine Germans, and Sephardic Jews. But all of them were heirs to a political and cultural tradition that set them off sharply from the Creoles of Spain's American dominions or from the newly conquered Catholic French of the St. Lawrence Valley. To a Chinese or a Persian, of course, all Western Europeans must have seemed much the same. But, in an age when absolutism ruled in much of mainland Europe, residents of Britain and its colonies could take pride in the fact that they lived in freedom.

What their freedom meant, however, is quite another matter. Were they asked to define it, some colonials, like some Britons, would have answered that it lay in the security of person and property that the common law guaranteed. Others might have said that it lay in specific privileges and liberties given to them by their colonial charters. Still others would have pointed to the Whig settlement under which England had ruled itself since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. They would have noted that the king could neither legislate nor tax without the consent of the people, who were represented in Parliament. They would have maintained that their own assemblies stood to them as the House of Commons stood to the people of England, Scotland, and Wales. If anything, they were even more free, in this sense, than Britons. In the metropolis, only a relative handful of people actually had the vote. Many years might elapse between chances to exercise it. In America, at least half and probably more of all white adult males could cast their ballot for assemblymen. In some of the provinces, the law gave them a chance to do so every year.

British freedom was thus no simple, easily grasped quality. It blended the right to be left alone under the law's protection and the right to take part in political affairs. By no means was it equivalent to a notion of abstract, universal human rights. People of different sorts had freedoms of different sorts. They enjoyed their particular freedoms as members of particular communities, inheriting them through tradition, custom, usage, and prescription. Any change in this fabric was likely to presage freedom's end and it had to be fought.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The American Revolution"
by .
Copyright © 1985 Edward Countryman.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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