First, thank you all for your interest in this series of diaries. I'm learning so much from your personal stories, and I'm pleased there's such an interest in American history here. I'll try not to squash it!
So to this week's topic, 1689-1763. It starts off with a disarming image. It's the Great Seal of the Dominion of New England, an administrative merger of the four colonies of New England, New York and New Jersey first executed in 1684 to try to cut down on the smuggling from their ports, and deposed unceremoniously when New England learned about the Bloodless Coup Glorious Revolution of 1688:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/...)
Observe the two supplicant figures kneeling before James II: an Indian and a colonist.
This should have been seen as a signal of something, but it took until the 1760s for the colonists to take notice.
After that, the period from the accession of William of Orange to the beginning of the Seven Years' War in 1754 is fairly uneventful with some flurries of activity at the beginning and the founding of Georgia in the middle. This is one of the reasons that I think the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is so useful. It covers the years of Franklin's life from 1706 to 1755, and Franklin stands in for American history during that period. There's even some stuff about him you don't know and we can deal with that at the beginning of this diary.
But the presentation goes through to 1763. While I was discussing what Winston Churchill called the first world war, I found all kinds of things -- comparisons to Iraq, ethnic removal, budget disasters, and more of the roots of the Revolution than I remembered, complete with a set of misunderstandings about who played what role in winning the war. Simultaneous Anglicization and Americanization.
Much more below. It's a little long, but I teach a three-hour class, so . . .
So to Franklin first, and three issues: "employed me in printing the money," retirement at 42, and the key and the kite.
First, the money:
Our debates possess'd me so fully of the subject, that I wrote and printed an anonymous pamphlet on it, entitled "The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency." It was well receiv'd by the common people in general; but the rich men dislik'd it, for it increas'd and strengthen'd the clamor for more money, and they happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it, their opposition slacken'd, and the point was carried by a majority in the House. My friends there, who conceiv'd I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money; a very profitable jobb and a great help to me. This was another advantage gain'd by my being able to write.
It sure was. "Printing the money" meant appointment to the position of clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, which meant that beside the money, he did
all the assembly's printing (laws, votes). In addition, he had to attend the meetings of the Assembly, write the minutes of its deliberations, and sometimes prepare resolutions and messages. He was also appointed to the same position for the Delaware legislature. This was REALLY his introduction to politics, at age 30.
This was lucrative. So was Poor Richard’s Almanac, as it became the most successful (and best selling) almanac in colonial America, and so was Franklin's network of printing plants and paper mills (by the mid-1740s Franklin was the largest dealer in paper in North America). All this led to Franklin, while he supervised the construction of the first buildings of what is now the University of Pennsylvania, taking as a partner
[the] very able, industrious, and honest, Mr. David Hall, with whose character I was well acquainted, as he had work'd for me four years. He took off my hands all care of the printing-office [and all his other business enterprises], paying me punctually my share of the profits. This partnership continued eighteen years, successfully for us both.
In other words, retiring from business at 42, building a new house in the outskirts of the central city, and buying a couple of slaves, as befitted an affluent citizen of Philadelphia.
And then there's this:
(Franklin Electric Company, Philadelphia)
When Franklin started his experiments all anybody knew about was static electricity, and the greatest advance anyone had made was the Leyden jar, which stores static electricity and had JUST been invented in 1745. Franklin was the first person to prove lightning was an electrical phenomenon, in 1752, and ALL subsequent experimentation with electricity is based on Franklin’s experiments. ALL of it. So you might understand Franklin better, this discovery helped him do something he thought was extremely valuable: invent the lightning rod.
One more thing about Franklin, and one of the last events in the Autobiography: the Albany Plan of Union, 1754. As Franklin describes it:
In 1754, war with France being again apprehended, a congress of commissioners from the different colonies was, by an order of the Lords of Trade, to be assembled at Albany, there to confer with the chiefs of the Six Nations [the Iroquois] concerning the means of defending both their country and ours. . . . In our way thither, I projected and drew a plan for the union of all the colonies under one government, so far as might be necessary for defense, and other important general purposes.
Only Thomas Hutchinson, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, thought this would be a good idea. Had it been adopted, the colonists would have been able to defend themselves in the seven years’ war, and Britain wouldn’t have stationed troops in the colonies nor had any pretense for taxes they laid on the colonies. But it wasn't, so on to Winston Churchill's First World War.
It started, not surprisingly, with land speculation, the issue that had caused all the major skirmishes with the Indians since the 1680s. In this case, land speculators from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania concluded a treaty with the Iroquois in 1744 that placed the western border of Virginia at the Ohio River (now the western border of West Virginia). Three years later, the Ohio Company of Virginia secured a a royal grant of 200,000 acres along the Ohio, and Virginia and Pennsylvania began to squabble over who would cut the Iroquois the best deal to get them off the land. This took a decidedly secondary role when French officials responded to the Ohio Company’s invasion of a region they considered part of New France.
The war began when the British governor of Virginia tried to remove the French from the forks of the Ohio at Fort Duquesne, as a way of promoting his own interests in company of land speculators determined to sell Ohio Valley lands to settlers. He sent a small regiment of colonial troops commanded by his fellow land speculator, George Washington, who was forced to surrender on July 4, 1754. This news got back to London, and the War ministry decided it had to send troops to North America to clean up after Washington, and, incidentally, to push the French back from the Ohio and from Nova Scotia. England already had gained possession of Nova Scotia in the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, but many of its inhabitants were still French speakers and the northern part was still held by the French.
British military efforts in North America in 1755 were based on an attempt to redress what imperial officials saw as an adverse balance of power and were deliberately scaled even by the "hawks" to do no more than remove French encroachments. Although the idea of ending the threat to their colonies by conquering Canada must have lurked in the backs of their minds, imperial officials did not intend to make any such investment of men and resources in 1755; that decision would surely have led to the general war they were trying to avoid.
The war was to be fought mostly by the men of British North America, and it was to be a limited war. Britain was supposed to provide the core around which the army would coalesce: commanders, a nucleus of trained troops, some artillery, ammunition, and specialists in military engineering. The two under-strength regiments that Newcastle spared from the Irish establishment were to be filled out with colonial recruits, and the colonies would, willingly or not, supply nearly everything else the expedition needed.
Two under-strength regiments. Where have I heard that before? Here's James Fallows, being interviewed by the PBS show Frontline in January 2004:
Between the Army, in particular, and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon -- Donald Rumsfeld especially, but also Paul Wolfowitz -- there was a basic philosophical difference about how you sized the force to go into Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld, through his career in the Pentagon, had been pushing very much for lean, mean, agile forces. By that logic, he said the U.S. should not over-prepare, overstaff, overload for the job of beating Saddam Hussein's regime. The Army, by contrast, was saying that beating Saddam Hussein was only part of the job. You needed then to think about what would happen afterwards, and towards that end, you needed more people than you would in the smallest possible expeditionary force. Therefore, there was a kind of bidding game that went on between the civilian leadership and the Army, where the Army and its allies in the other forces were saying, "We'd like about 400,000 troops to go in." Rumsfeld's idea was more like 75,000. Through a process of negotiation, the U.S. finally went to war with the low 200,000s of troops in Iraq.
The first British actions were taken in Nova Scotia. There, a combined force British regulars, new English volunteers overwhelmed two French posts at head of Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia,
deported the French Acadians, and confiscated their farms and livestock for appropriation by New England land speculators and settlers. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about this in 1847.
(Illustrations by F.O. Darley, taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline [Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893]; Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management Documentary Art Collection)
Preparation for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, I suppose, only these white people spoke French and had remained Catholic. In a lot of ways, the descendents of these people were able to make lemonade out of the lemons they had forced upon them.
Laissez les bonnes temps roulez indeed! (and my apologies to the Cajun Kossacks -- the map at the Louisiana Tourist Board wouldn't load.).
Meanwhile, back in the Ohio Valley, the British did no better at Fort Duquesne than Washington had done. The veteran British general, Edward Braddock, who was unwilling to adapt his manner of warfare to the American forest, led his 2200 troops into an ambush within 10 miles of fort in which Braddock was killed. His second in command, George Washington, redeemed his military reputation by his skillful management of the retreat. That emboldened the Leni Lenape (Delaware) and the Shawnee Indians in the Ohio Valley to attack English settlements in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, reenacting their own version of King Philip's War as the survivors fled eastward, pushing frontier back toward the Atlantic.
These raids pinned down the British and colonial army, which allowed the French to take the offensive 1756-1757 as the Iroquois provided little or no help to British defenders. The French success caused the government in Britain to fall, bringing William Pitt (the Elder) into power. Pitt became known as the colonists' friend, as he bought colonial cooperation by reimbursing colonial expenditures in cash – while this greatly augmented colonial support for the war it saddled the Empire with a significant amount of debt. Pitt castigated the previous government for having sent only “two miserable battalions” to America, but made no attempt to reform the way the colonies were governed because London wasn’t prepared to risk contentious measures.
So, in the North American campaign of 1758 British mustered 45,000 troops, about half British regulars, and half colonial volunteers (although colonial troops were thought to be better suited to war in America). The French could only employ 6800 regulars and 2700 provincials, supplemented by Indian warriors. The Leni Lenape and the Shawnee deserted the French, opened trade with British; miffed, the French blew up Fort Duquesne, and the British replaced it with Fort Pitt, which was ten times larger. The British began their attack on Quebec when the British fleet besieged the fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, which allowed the British access to mouth St. Lawrence River; cleared way for General James Wolfe to attack city of Quebec in 1759 (the British won, Wolfe was killed). In 1760, the British captured Montreal, ending French control of the Canadian portion of New France.
(The Death of Wolfe, Benjamin West, 1770, National Gallery of Canada) - and please note the concerned Indian in the foreground.
The Treaty of Paris (1763) reshaped the European presence in North America, as France gave up its territory. Canada became British, and the French possessions west of the Mississippi were ceded to Spain. To even things out, Spain ceded Florida to England. In addition, England established a "Proclamation Line" that ran down the crest of the Appalachians to keep the European settlers of British North America east of it
For the colonists, the war completed the Anglicization that had begun with the increased trade in material goods by intensifying their deep affection for and pride in being British. They expected that Britain would observe its implied contract with them and repay loyalty with respect for their rights as Englishmen. The British didn't see it that way. From the point of view of the British press and public, the British regulars and the Royal Navy were the heroes of North America, not the colonial soldiers, nor the Indians who fought on the British side. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the colonists continued to supply the French West Indies and Canada, reluctant to cut off any of their preexisting trade routes. It appears likely that London paid more attention to stories that American illegal trade was undermining the blockades of the French colonies than they were to accounts of the huge number of men being put into the field by the colonies toward the end of the war. In the British version of the war, the colonies had been helpless victims of French and Indian aggression until they were saved by British forces. I'm not sure what this corresponds to but you're invited to take a crack at it in the comments.
The conclusion of the war also intensified a change in British attitudes toward British Americans: in 1763 Lord Halifax expressed the opinion that "the people of England" considered the Americans "though H. M.'s subjects, as foreigners.” An alternative position arose in London that the colonists occupied a midway position between fully fledged Britons and undoubted foreigners--as fellow-subjects but not quite fellow-nationals. On the other hand, in the same year, members of the public in Britain subscribed generously to an appeal for funds for two colonial colleges.
Still, Britain didn't see that it might have a problem in the colonies. Ben Franklin, in London representing Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Georgia, assured his English friends that since the colonists had different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners, they needn't worry that the residents of the thirteen colonies would figure out what they had in common. The next twelve years would show them.
I'll be back to deal with comments by 9:30 Eastern time tomorrow morning.
9:06 AM PT: Since I really didn't mention any books in the diary, here are a couple of suggestions:
To get past the Walter Isaacson stuff on Franklin, I recommend Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and for more details about Franklin as a rich 18th century merchant, see DavidWaldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004).
There really is only one definitive book on the Seven Years' War, and it's the one I cribbed my lecture notes from: Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000).
There's also always The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper's remembrance of the war, too.
9:35 AM PT: Off for a few hours -- library work, student-related stuff. I'll be back to clarify and review by 2:30 PST.
1:00 PM PT: Where are my manners? Thanks for the repostings!