The American Revolution 1783

The 3rd of September, 1983, marks the bicentenary of the signing of the definitive Treaty of Versailles by which Britain formerly recognised the independence of the United States. Seven years after the Declaration of Independence – seven years of sometimes gruelling warfare – the British colonists in North America had made good by force their demand to be separate from Britain. What had produced this convulsion? What had caused former Englishmen to be Englishmen no longer, to assert their separate identity as Americans? Historians are still probing for answers to this question, and continue to emerge with yet more sophisticated conclusions.

To those in America who had lived through the crisis and taken up arms for independence, the answer seemed simple. Their inherited constitutional liberties had come under attack and could only be preserved by a severance of all institutional ties with the mother country. The imperial government's treatment of them had amounted to tyranny, a tyranny unacceptable to free men. So they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence itself. And yet, with the hindsight of two hundred years, this charge seems to embrace a fantastic paradox. For, with the possible exception of the United Provinces of the Northern Netherlands, no European society enjoyed so great a degree of liberty as that of Britain. Arbitrary power had been banished with the Stuarts. The country's rulers were committed to the principle of the rule of law. No one in Britain was a serf or a slave. In theory at least all subjects had the protection of the law, and whatever the elements of injustice endemic in the system in practice, nevertheless it worked more often than might sometimes be assumed. Those accused of serious crimes were safe unless a jury of twelve was convinced of their guilt. The very poor could claim rights to support from their parishes; and no one who has read widely in the history of the eighteenth-century Poor Law car have any doubts how their rights were upheld if necessary by those members of the gentry who had responsibility as Justices of the Peace. In British society there were recognised sub-divisions of rank, but there was no distinction of caste. Men of all ranks rubbed elbows in streets and coffee houses and had equal rights on roads and pavements. In most respects this common heritage stretched from shore to shore of the North Atlantic. That is a point interestingly acknowledged by an American statesman on a noteworthy occasion not long ago. In June 1982 the President of the United States visited London; and in an address on June 8th to members of the two Houses of Parliament he said:

Speaking for all Americans, I want to say how very much at home we feel in your house. Every American would, because this is one of democracy's shrines. Here the rights of free people and the processes of representation have been debated and refined.

These debates and these refinings had certainly begun in Britain long before the American Revolution. And President Reagan's perception – or, one should say, the American perception faithfully reported by him – seems to point to the heart of our paradox: that in the late eighteenth century, in the name of liberty, one free people forcibly wrenched itself asunder from another free people.

To pursue the nature of this paradox provides one road towards greater understanding of the nature of the crisis which brought forth American independence. One must begin by considering the American colonial perception of the events of the 1760s and the 1770s. For this there is ample material. The colonists set up a chorus of official complaints from their assemblies against the British Stamp Act of 1765, and a number of their most able publicists, including James Otis, Daniel Dulany, and John Dickinson, enlarged on the grounds of opposition to it in well-written pamphlets both before and after it was passed. The further measures of Charles Townshend in 1767, notably his Revenue Act imposing further taxes by customs duties, provoked new condemnation in the colonies. Some of it was in literary form, as in the case of John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Some of it emerged in official or semi-official pronouncements, ranging from resolutions of assemblies to such instruments as the well-publicised manifesto issued by the Boston Town Meeting towards the close of 1772. Finally, the crisis of 1774, arising out of the Boston Tea Party of late 1773, provoked not only the official protestations of the Continental Congress, but also two major treatises re-stating the colonial view of the constitutional relationship between the colonies and Britain – James Wilson's Considerations on the Authority of Parliament , and Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America .

It is thus clear that, while colonial claims were gradually extended, as particular issues were brought to the fore during the unfolding of the imperial crisis, an underlying attitude can be traced throughout. Colonists were willing up to the last to give allegiance to the king and to treat him as the fount of executive authority, but more and more clearly they declined to recognise the legislative and fiscal authority of Parliament. At first, this rejection of Parliament's authority related almost exclusively to taxation. Indeed, during the 1760s it was not even clear that this rejection extended to customs duties imposed for revenue, as well as to direct taxation; but by the early 1770s the repudiation of all forms of parliamentary taxation had become clear. Before long the rejection of parliamentary pretensions became far more comprehensive. This was because the legislation passed by Parliament in 1774, the so-called Coercive Acts, obliged colonists either to submit completely, or to condemn – as they did – all parliamentary claims to legislate on any matter relating to law and order, or the arrangement or the functioning of government within the limits of the colony. If Parliament could alter the form of government enjoyed under the Charter of Massachusetts, then no safeguard for the continuance of traditional liberties remained. Another issue which came increasingly to the fore during the 1770s was the right of Parliament to make regulations governing commercial relationships spanning the oceans. James Wilson's desire to extinguish it led him to the surprising suggestion, that the king ought to regulate inter-imperial commerce by the royal prerogative. Jefferson went further in arguing that all such trade relations should be settled on the basis of free negotiation between equals.

At the heart of this conflict of views lurked a fundamental clash between American and British conceptions of the role of Parliament. The British saw Parliament as essentially vested with legislative supremacy, a supremacy which included its statutory control of the funds at the disposal of the executive arm of the central government. Whether as the ancillary instrument of medieval monarchs or as the partner in an alliance with modern kings after 1689, Parliament had traditionally long exercised the function of making laws for all subjects of the crown wherever they might be domiciled. Historically it had evolved as a body representative of an élites, and it embodied implicit assumptions that some individuals belonging to certain ranks, interests, or communities, could speak for the rest of the people in these ranks, interests, and communities. These were the concepts which came to be discussed in the 1760s under the definition, 'virtual representation'. On these grounds some British publicists seeking to justify British colonial policy after 1763 were to argue with, so far as they were concerned, real conviction, that the British in Britain and in America formed one single nation, with common interests that required a single directing authority, and that only Parliament could fulfil that role. In their view, it was irrelevant that some elements of the population in some areas, whether it might be the city of Manchester or the town of Boston, did not themselves enjoy and exercise the right of personally participating in the election of Members of Parliament. It was not completely far-fetched, for instance, to argue that Members of Parliament would be just as concerned to defend British subjects in colonies overseas as they would be to defend Britain itself; that those among them who had any sort of connection with the woollen and worsted industries of Yorkshire would also seek to promote the general prosperity of American colonies which provided an important market for such manufacturers; or that merchant MPs connected with trades in sugar, indigo, or tobacco, would similarly feel concern about the prosperity of colonists who earned their way by producing those commodities, and whose power to purchase British goods in return depended on the nursing of their interests. The monarchy alone could no longer act as the supreme director of the common concerns of the Empire. The constitutional developments of the seventeenth century had eliminated that possibility. Royal law-making was now ended. Without financial support from Parliament the king was powerless. The focus of political power in Britain had shifted considerably since the days when the American settlements were being founded.

The American colonists of the mid-eighteenth century saw matters in a very different light – so different, that their perceptions of the locus of legislative and fiscal authority proved wholly irreconcilable with those held in London. The reasons for this were numerous and complex.

In the first place, almost from the beginning American colonists had regulated their own internal polities with the help of their own representative assemblies. Subject only to a very haphazard degree of control through the royal legislative veto, exercised in this instance in the Privy Council, they had made financial provision for their own local administration, and local laws for the regulation of their provincial affairs, in supplementation of the common and statute law of England which they had brought to America as part of their cultural baggage in the course of the seventeenth century. Their assemblies had acted, in important respects, as miniature parliaments. At the same time, they had begun to evolve in a slightly different direction from that taken by the British Parliament in the years after 1689. Some, though not all, operated under a system of very frequent – usually annual – elections. This practice, which was common to the various New England colonies, emphasised the delegate character of the elected representatives and made them extremely sensitive and responsive to public opinion.

There was a significant contrast in this respect with the regime of septennial Parliaments which became normal in Britain after the Hanoverian accession in 1714. All the assemblies, whether frequently elected or not, evolved as institutions aloof from the executive arm of government. There were no experiments in the first British Empire, as there were to be during the little of the second, with executive councils, forming governing cabinets under the presidency of the governor, which were composed of members of the lower houses of legislature – no parallel, that is, in the colonies, with the role occupied by British ministers of the Crown and other court and administrative officers who sat in the House of Commons. In consequence, the attitude of representative assemblies in the colonies towards the exercise of power and authority by the governors and their servants was more critical and suspicious, even hostile, than that of the British House of Commons towards the king's government. It was a system moving towards a real separation of powers. Among other consequences, this development had the psychologically disrupting result that men who were socially eminent in the colonies, whether as merchants, landowners, lawyers, or planters, were denied the opportunity and satisfaction of a positive and responsible political role in their communities. They could never hope to become leading administrators under the governor with a real chance to influence policy. If people are unable to manipulate power, they are likely – if they have that type of eminence and ability – to resist it in the course of defending their interests.

A second consideration, closely connected with the first, was that because many colonists had a strong conscious involvement in the local political life of their own colonies, either as electors or as elected representatives, they developed a clear sense of separateness from the imperial legislative machine. Participation in, let us say, Massachusetts, contrasted sharply with non-participation in what was going on in London, and the emphasis on the one tended to generate diffidence over the other. This extreme provincialism of colonial politicians showed itself on a number of occasions during the late eighteenth century. It helped to torpedo suggestions for a united American council to control frontier policy put forward at the Albany Congress of 1754; it was manifested in the hostility of the first Continental Congress to a plan for an all-American legislature put forward by the Pennsylvanian politician, Joseph Galloway, in 1774; and it showed itself again, though without ultimate success, in the debates over Federation in 1787-88. It coloured the colonial discussions of the British claims about 'virtual representation' during the 1760s, and it was plainly visible in American reactions to the idea of the granting of representation at Westminster to the colonists. There was some speculative interest in this idea on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1760s. James Otis at first wrote of it approvingly, and on the British side, George Grenville seems, towards the end of his life, to have thought it an expedient worth exploring. But there was little real interest in it in London; and colonial publicists in general treated it with a considerable measure of hostility and contempt. Jealous of the local powers which their assemblies had won, colonial politicians deeply resented any threat to them which might develop from British attempts to strengthen the central directing authority in the Empire.

A third factor in the development of American colonial attitudes was a growing divergence of interests, associated with local strength and self-confidence. On no European overseas empire in the eighteenth century did the curbs set by the metropolitan state sit more lightly. Nevertheless those curbs were increasingly felt as a source of grievance, and to a colonist they could appear far more arbitrary and irrational than they looked to men in London. Some of them were more of a threat in posse than in esse. In 1699 Parliament had legislated against the export of woollen cloth by any colony; in 1732 it had restricted the manufacture of hats; in 1750 it had passed an Act prohibiting the further expansion of iron foundries and forges (but not smelting works) in the colonies. All these measures had been ignored in America. In some areas a flourishing manufacture of iron wares was developing after 1750. But if the authority of Parliament was to be taken more seriously – and this was the general implication of British colonial policy after 1763 – then the welfare of some colonial manufacturers would be adversely affected.

More severely felt, because they conflicted with the instinctive aspirations of merchants to buy in the cheapest markets and sell in the dearest, were the constraints imposed on overseas commerce by the Acts of Trade. Numbers of commodities – the so-called 'enumerated goods', including North American tobacco, iron, and indigo, and a wide range of Caribbean products traded in by North American merchants – could legally only be disposed of in another colony or in Great Britain. Southern Europe was a lawful market for other produce of North America – for instance, rice grown in South Carolina – but on paper at least, after 1766, ships clearing from North American and West Indian ports were prohibited from calling at any European port north of Cape Finisterre. To some extent this was simply a facet of the constant economic warfare waged against France by British governments, but it was also aimed at the suppression of a considerable illegal direct return traffic in European manufactures, contrary to the Staple Act of 1663. European products were supposed to be routed to the colonies only through Britain, to secure revenue from customs, and protect British manufactures from foreign competition. But from the colonial viewpoint these were forms of discrimination against British subjects in America.

The interior of the American continent presented a further arena for conflicting views. Ruthless frontiersmen and scarcely less ruthless land speculators coveted the lands of Indian tribes west of the Allegheny Mountains, and found themselves in collision with a British government concerned partly to safeguard Indian rights, partly to avoid Indian border wars, and partly to preserve a major prop of the economy of the colony of Quebec annexed from France in 1763 – the fur trade around the Great Lakes and in the area stretching south to the River Ohio. Thus, in a number of ways, freedom of economic opportunity was at least a part of the aspirations of the American colonists, although almost the whole thrust of the colonial argument with the mother country bore upon the issue of constitutional liberties.

It takes two sides to make a conflict; and had these colonial attitudes and aspirations been pushing at an open door during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, there would have been no American Revolution, at least in the violent form which the event produced. But this was not to be the case. It transpired that the politicians steering events in the British cabinet and Parliament set out to defend and consolidate a status quo , which was clear to their perception but not to that of the colonists. In doing so the British appeared to the colonists to perpetrate a series of apparently menacing innovations. There was a rationale underlying British policy. This is a theme which has been grasped and elucidated by a small number of specialist historians of the Revolution, mainly in the United States; but with one or two exceptions scarcely any American scholar has tried to build it into a general account of the revolutionary crisis. The concern with American causes – the concerns and viewpoints which I have mainly engaged in outlining so far – still dominates and monopolises the general narrative in such a recently produced standard survey as Robert Middlekauff's book, The Glorious Cause (1982), in the Oxford History of the United States . In consequence, except for the experts, the received story remains a lop-sided one. We are still in the situation that Namier described in 1929: 'America has by now entered as a community into the picture of the Revolution, while Great Britain remains more or less the figure on our copper coins.' And 'humanising' requires not so much the opening up of political biography which Namier undertook, as an analysis of the attitudes and impressions guiding the actions of the parliamentary figures which he turned for us into flesh and blood. A balanced narrative of the American Revolution does call for an appreciation and understanding of how British politicians envisaged the situation and what they were trying to do in order to deal with the problems they perceived in it. To paraphrase what I have written elsewhere: 'It does not advance knowledge of the American Revolution merely to attribute it to British parochialism or original sin.'

The beginnings of the American crisis emerged immediately after the end of the Anglo-French Seven Years War, terminated by the Peace of Paris of 1763. At least some of the investigation undertaken by specialist scholars on the other side of the Atlantic has tended to emphasise how the war itself contributed to the growth of strains within the Empire. From the London viewpoint, what the war did was to make considerably more pressing and burdensome the responsibility of imperial defence. It did this in ways which did not readily register on American colonial consciousness; for there seems to be a paradox in the suggestion that defence was still a problem, when the French had withdrawn entirely from the North American continent. Nova Scotia no longer needed to be protected against the fortress of Louisberg, nor New York from incursions from the directions of Quebec and Montreal, and there was no longer a foreign military barrier to British penetration into the Ohio Valley. But to men in London with the responsibility for considering the safety of the British Isles, the North American Empire, and the West Indies, as one whole, the situation looked far less reassuring. The French intention to be revenged was an open secret. Defence of the homeland against invasion and protection of the colonial trade routes and bases imposed an obligation to maintain effective naval power. The French surrender of the Ohio and St Lawrence valleys dictated the assumption of military commitments, initially to occupy conquests – to establish effective ownership in international law – and then to guard against insurgency among the French-speaking populations torn from French rule. The southward advance of the imperial frontier on the American mainland carried in some ways even more burdensome implications.

Before 1763 the greater part of the Floridas had been a virtually uncolonised frontier zone in Spanish hands, lightly garrisoned by them at one or two points such as St Augustine and Pensacola, and thus holding the British in North America at arm's length from the Spanish empire in the Caribbean. While Georgia had remained the southernmost British colony, its capital of Savannah represented a relatively limited defence commitment. But with the annexation of the Floridas, together with that part of former French Louisiana which lay east of the Iberville River, the British acquired hundreds of miles of Caribbean coastline. They loomed immediately over Cuba. They owned the area of the Florida Keys, and these flanked the crucial sea route which, owing to the dictation of winds and tides, all shipping had to take on its way from the western Caribbean to Europe. Round the Mississippi delta, they directly fronted the Spaniards in the new Spanish defensive base which the French had ceded to Spain – New Orleans.

The apprehensions of the Spanish – and of the French – at this southwards advance of British bases were understandable. The first thing the French did after the Peace of Paris of 1763 was to send a formidable military reinforcement to their West Indian islands, Because Florida so much more directly menaced Bourbon territory in the Caribbean area, it was a provocative feature in the international situation, and for the British a region which had to be garrisoned. Seen from London all these commitments hung together: defence of Britain; control of former French North America; maintenance of the defensive glacis in the south, and the over-aweing of the potential Bourbon enemies. Hence the call for an imperial defence revenue, to be raised by parliamentary authority from all the colonies.

Defence was not the only problem. In the eighteenth century the commercial relationships of the great imperial nations were determined according to the ideas which are sometimes dignified by the description, 'mercantilist system'. Mercantilism often worked less coherently and consistently than the word 'system' would suggest, but there were nevertheless distinctive principles relating to the conduct of trade, which gave rise to particular consequences in practice. A colony was regarded as a closed preserve. Foreign shipping was to be excluded. Foreign goods were either excluded, or their ingress carefully controlled and for this purpose channelled in only through the ports of the metropolitan state. Colonial products serving either as raw materials, e.g. cotton-wool, dyestuffs, or as consumer goods, e.g. sugar, tobacco, were monopolised by the parent state, so that other nations would not gain direct benefit by processing and re-exporting them. To the restrictions imposed within the British Empire by this system were added those arising out of the trade war which formed a permanent feature of Anglo-French relations from 1713 to 1786. In London it was an axiom of imperial and commercial policy, that no trade relationships with France were to be allowed which might foster French power to a greater extent than that of Britain. This meant in practice that direct legitimate trade between the two countries was negligible as compared with British traffic with other European regions – even although smuggled brandy added something to the overall amount.

The enforcement of this trade policy upon the colonists as well as on the home population in Britain itself became a major preoccupation of ministers after 1763. In 1764 the ministers believed – and presumably they had a reasonable amount of information on which to base their suspicion – that the New England colonies were conducting a direct trade with France, in contravention of the Navigation Acts, three or four times larger than the trade between Britain and France. One objection to this development was that it ministered to the strength of the potential enemy. Another was that it meant direct French competition with British goods in the North American colonial markets. So far as the colonies were concerned, it seems clear that their interests were pushing them in the direction of a more liberated commercial policy than was compatible with the system to which the British government clung.

A simple protectionist concern was one factor leading ministers in London to set their faces against any such change in commercial policy; but equally important was their preoccupation with the power of the Empire in the jungle o1 international politics. Unity of organisation was felt to be essential for imperia.' defence. The resources of the whole Empire must be engaged. To draw these resources together on the basis of a free voluntary confederation was never seriously contemplated in London. If eve: any fleeting thought was given to it ii ministerial circles, it was rejected as impracticable on the basis of disillusioning experience with the system of royal requisitions which had operated between 1755 and 1764. After 1763 British ministers wrote it off as unrealistic ii exactly the same way as the American proponents of the Federal constitution were to do in their essays in the Federalist Papers during the late 1780s.

The problems of the international dimension were not wholly absent either from the minds of some of the American revolutionary leaders during the run-up to Independence in the 1770s. Some of them wondered, if American safety depended on British support, what would happen if that British support were repudiated? Would France take advantage of events to reclaim Canada and the Illinois region? Would independent Americans be sucked into a French power system, instead of a British? Would France simply sell out the American cause after exploiting a British civil war to recover her own possessions lost in 1763? One American revolutionary leader, John Dickinson, threw a temporary blight on his own career in 1776 by voicing such fears at the Continental Congress at Philadelphia and by refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence. But he was in a minority. Other revolutionary leaders played down the international dangers. Concern with these represented a train of thought which had not taken root in American minds. It still has not done so in the minds of many American historians of the Revolution. A striking feature of the in many ways admirable standard account by Robert Middlekauff is the complete omission of the international dimension. Yet contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic could not ignore it. It was a powerful, perhaps determining factor in British policy up to 1776. There is at least one well-informed report, that in 1774 ministers in London were saying that they would have washed their hands of the colonies, but for the fear that these would fall into the clutches of France or Spain, with consequent fatal damage to the balance of power. If historians ignore the British reaction to the international dimension during the crisis of the American Revolution, then an important element of explanation and of understanding of events is overlooked.

The preoccupation with the international dimension led British imperial governments in the 1760s and 1770s into courses of action which eventually came to be regarded by the American colonists as intolerable, and which the colonists proved to have the strength and will to resist. These forms of action included the raising of money by parliamentary taxation, under the Plantation (or Sugar) Act of 1764, the abortive Stamp Act of 1765, and the Plantation Acts of 1766 and of 1767 (the latter of these commonly known as Townshend's Act). The first three of these Acts imposed taxation solely to provide funds for expenditure on defence. The fourth taxed Americans in order to provide for civil list payments: in this case the object was to reduce the dependence of officials of the colonial administration and higher judiciary upon annual appropriations of their salaries by the colonial assemblies. All these measures drew American denunciation on the score of the violation of the principle of no taxation without representation. In part, the fate of the Empire became impaled on the conflict between two essential constitutional principles: the sovereignty of Parliament throughout the Empire on the one hand, and the link between direct representation and consent to taxation on the other. So far as the small, relatively impotent, and highly dependent West Indian colonies were concerned, the second of these warring principles had to give way to the first. The greater weight of power of the mainland colonies enabled them to insist that the first should prevail for them, but only at the cost of the destruction of the Empire.

The second major course on which the British governments became set in the 1760s and 1770s was a thorough overhaul and tightening up of trade regulations. This was mainly undertaken in three statutes: the Plantation (Sugar) Act of 1764, and two subsequent amending statutes of 1765 and 1766. Only limited sections of these Acts were concerned with taxation. The effect of many of the clauses in them was to increase very considerably the swathes of red tape surrounding the movement of commodities of all kinds in and out of colonial ports, and to give the customs officials added powers to enforce regulations by prosecutions for illegal trafficking. Every government between 1764 and 1770 did something to add to the weight of these controls over commercial activity. The Act of 1764 greatly increased the list of enumerated commodities which could not be sent direct from a colony to a foreign destination. It also affirmed the right of customs officials to take revenue cases for trial to local vice-admiralty courts, where they were heard before judges only and defendants could not rely on juries sympathetically biased towards them. The second amending Act of 1766, closing loopholes in previous legislation, finally precluded any possibility of ships cleared from colonial ports legally entering any mainland European port north of Cape Finisterre. Townshend's Revenue Act of 1767 strengthened the formal powers of customs officials in America by authorising the use of the search-warrant commonly known as a writ of assistance; and a further statute sponsored by him legalised the creation of the American Board of Commissioners of Customs, a high-powered body intended to impose discipline and firm direction upon the service. Another Act of 1768 permitted the establishment of four imperial courts of vice-admiralty, with powers to hear cases either at first instance or on appeal, in place of one such court which had been created in 1764.

Trade regulations presented the colonists initially with a less clearly defined challenge of principle than taxation, but nevertheless one over which arguments of mere commercial expediency were soon set aside in favour of pleas of constitutional grievance. Prior to 1767 the legality of writs of assistance had been challenged in the courts, and after that date the procedure was rendered null by the forms of resistance developed against it, including the use of violence. Colonists also insisted as a matter of constitutional principle on rights of trial by jury, and denounced and obstructed the use of the vice-admiralty courts. Within a few years the logic of their position drove them to challenge Parliament's power to make commercial regulations at all. The colonial charge that many of the provisions of the Trade and Navigation Acts were a form of discrimination against them was not without substance; for if American territories were as much part of the king's dominions as any English county or city – a line of argument followed by one or two of the most sober and respectable of George Grenville's apologists – then it was unjust that they should not enjoy the same rights as any English province or outport and export and import commodities freely to and from any markets they chose. Existing exceptions only made the injustice more plain. When South Carolina already enjoyed this right with respect to the export of rice to southern Europe and to foreign destinations in the New World, and when any colony with surpluses of agricultural produce and timber could send them anywhere, it became anomalous that Virginian tobacco or Pennsylvanian pig iron did not benefit from similar freedom. Clearly certain vested interests in Britain were served at colonial expense. Yet at the same time numerous benefits also came to the colonies in the form of bounties, of assured markets, and of capital investment, often in the form of advances of credit. The complexity of these commercial relationships makes it by no means easy to discern how the balance of advantage was to 'be struck between the home country and the colonies.

On the issues of taxation and commercial control, the gulf between opposing claims ultimately became unbridgeable. Colonists used trade boycotts and riot, and general non-cooperation to frustrate imperial policy, and the consequent attempts to reinforce imperial authority merely piled up further issues for dispute. The claim of Parliament to have authority to remodel colonial government in America, asserted in the Massachusetts Charter Act of 1774, clashed with the English revolutionary principle derived from the events of 1689, assumed by American colonists to be part of their birthright, that in the last resort the authority of government was derived from the will of the governed. Step by step American colonists had been brought, first to deny the power of Parliament to tax, then its powers to make laws, and finally its competence to shape their forms of government. Once they were driven to this last position, the spectrum of possibilities became reduced to three: successful British military coercion; an agreed confederation-type relationship; or American independence. During the great parliamentary debates on American affairs in 1774 and 1775 two leading critics of government policy, Edmund Burke and the Earl of Chatham, were both, in different modes, feeling their way towards the second possibility, as the only statesmanlike one; but neither could command more than a derisory measure of parliamentary support. Most members of both Houses of Parliament were adamant in their insistence upon the maintenance of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, because to them a unitary empire seemed the only basis for national security; and they grossly underestimated the opposition that would have to be overcome in a civil war. Their decision reduced the options to two; and the course of hostilities between 1775 and 1782 ensured that the outcome would be American independence.

Even without the added impediment of foreign intervention, it is doubtful whether British military power could have subdued America, or, had this been done, could have held it for long. In the event, the tempting opportunity to destroy the power of a rival brought both France and Spain into the struggle, and British fighting resources were soon strained beyond the limit the Anglo-American peace treaty of September 1783, and the general tenor of the terms separately concluded with France and Spain, marked the formal recognition of this fact.

Ian R. Christie is Astor Professor of British History at University College, London.