I recently finished reading Eric Metaxas book Revolution. Based on what he wrote and what I know the British had become very secular and corrupt and immoral by 1776, while at the same time, the colonies had become very Christian and moral. They saw it as their destiny to create in the United States, a new covenant nation dedicated to living under God‘s law.
Inevitable is a bit strong, but perhaps highly likely. BTW, Eric's book is sitting right here beside me, and his imprint is about to publish my new book too!
The colonies demanded the rights of Englishmen, no different than if they were physically in England. It was not an unreasonable request, considering that they had never consented to a reduction in those rights simply by virtue of relocation.
The problem from Lord North's point of view was that they were articulating a Jacobite (not Jacobin) political theory, that different parliaments could rule within the same empire under the same king and that no parliament was legitimate apart from the sanction of the electorate. This posed a problem: if you grant the argument in North America, how can you not grant it to an only recently-suppressed Scotland? An imperial parliament representing everyone, with local parliaments in the various constituent areas, was a perfectly good solution to this and was debated extensively in the decades leading up to the Statute of Westminster in 1931. But the English rejected that in 1931 too, however foolish that rejection may have been.
In any case, as you know, the colonies' idea of governance was rejected by Lord North, and then implemented across the empire beginning with Canada in 1867.
If the English had possessed just a tad more flexibility, the relationship might have changed somewhat but complete severance would have been unnecessary. Either William Pitt might have gotten there, but North was never going to.
But the divergence in faith you (and Eric) describe was very real. The founders were the children of the Great Awakening even more than the Enlightenment, and that's a fact that has been downplayed or denied by the academic/Enemedia consensus since shortly after World War II.
Interesting, though of course one must add the requisite caveat that there are no correct alternate histories, only plausible ones.
Left unaddressed is the vexing question of democratization: in the absence of a successful popularly-based independence in "the colonies," how long and to what extent would it have taken for the British Empire have relinquished its oligarchical, soft-authoritarian mode of government?
Additional thought: I took Warner Schilling's class in American foreign relations when I was at Columbia, and his argument was that the Revolution was a product of the British success in eliminating the French threat in North America. Once the colonies were no longer needful of the British defensive umbrella, it changed from being a necessity to a burden.
Of course this was not helped by the bizarre British policies of forcing the colonies to pay for their defense after the war was over, without giving them much of a say in how such policies were to be executed.
That is certainly the British view (reflected in the article), that the colonies were ungrateful after the enormous British exertion to secure their hinterland, and freed up from that threat were able to bit the hand that fed it.
The American view of the post-war taxation, of course, was rather different. And let's be real, the amount wasn't the point. If local parliaments could be bypassed at will by Lord North's government, then the colonists had unknowingly surrendered their rights as Englishmen simply by moving to another part of the same country, separated by an ocean but theretofore not by legal status. Moreover, given the French alliance, it is more likely the colonies would have revolted, with greater success sooner, had the French retained their North American territories (though American expansion might have been more restricted in that case).
As I mentioned in another comment, Lord North saw this as an inherently Jacobite (not Jacobin) argument, which in point of fact it was.
I studied all this at Cambridge so I'm well aware of the British view, but I have to disagree. This was not at all about ingratitude, although the colonies remembered very well the degree to which they had carried their weight during the war and tended to marvel that the British treated that as nothing. This was actually about what the founders said it was: an ever-increasing encroachment on these British subjects' rights, secured in 1688, simply due to geography. That made sense to Lord North. It did not make sense to George Washington.
My guess is, it likely would have also made sense to Pitt the Younger. But alas, the Whigs didn't win until the war had already been decided.
Well, Warner Schilling was no Brit, and he didn’t frame this as “ingratitude,” he framed it as realpolitik. So he arrives at a similar conclusion using the tools of political science and international relations, rather than the far more slender reed of emotional attitudes.
Not do I disagree that there were other factors. In fact there are so many theories that one can hardly argue—and Schilling certainly did not—that there can be a single, all-encompassing theory of the Revolution’s causes.
Schilling merely provided an additional—not an alternate—set of factors that he evidently believed—as a political scientist and international-relations expert—might add to our understanding.
Well, I daresay we are all the prisoners of our own professional deformation, political scientists and international-relations experts no less—and no more—so than anyone else.
I don’t believe I ever suggested—and to underscore the point, nor did Schilling—that the realpolitik explanation was the only or even the main factor in triggering the Revolution. He was mostly using it to illustrate a larger point, which is there are other perspectives than narrowly “historical” ones.
In a class on the history of United States international security policy…it certainly seems appropriate to bring it up—even to the seeming deprecation of other aspects of the same topic—and in the context of your analysis, it seemed pertinent for me to do so as well.
Not at all. As I said, my disagreement is not with his statement but with his emphasis as I understand it from your recounting. What he describes absolutely played a part.
A very insightful counterfactual by the great Andrew Roberts! His invaluable biographies of Winston Churchill and King George III are essential reading. Make no mistake about it, it’s a wonderful thing the United States became independent. But it is very possible America and Britain could’ve prospered together and history could possibly have been changed much for the better. The British were never willing to treat the American colonists as equals and they looked down on them. They did not give them gradual self-autonomy as they did with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They made one crucial mistake after another that pushed the American colonies to revolt. The American colonies were a huge asset to the British Empire but through bad policies, discrimination and short sightedness, they lost them. The British victory in the French-Indian War emboldened the colonists and convinced them now was the time to make their stand. The British could’ve put all that to rest had they just not played hard ball with the colonists!
If the Whigs had been in power, there might never have been a revolution. That's the one point I was surprised Roberts failed to make, although given space constraints I can understand why he didn't want to digress into a discussion of whig philosophy as it related to the Jacobites.
How plausible is it that America even *could* have been represented in Parliament? Most of what I've read about America's position even ten or twenty years before the Declaration, when they were still asserting their rights as Englishmen, makes it sound like it was a given that Parliamentary representation was clearly infeasible given the distance and (frankly) risk from sea travel, which meant that having their own legislatures under the King was the only practical possibility.
I could imagine an Britain a century earlier, before the colonies grew enough for their local legislatures to have momentum, *might* have had the foresight to nip them in the bud by offering Parliamentary representation (if Britain hadn't been preoccupied with Stuart despotism and civil war). But surely the challenges of Atlantic travel were even greater then.
It is spoken of that way now, but it was perfectly feasible, just as our missions to London, Paris, and other capitals were, then and later. The communication problem was no different than that between Georgia and New York, the distance was just greater. It's that distance that made a representative form of government so important to the Founders: they knew that their alternatives were a centralized imperial structure or disunited states in which travel to the (state) capital was not difficult.
Their federative solution was creative and powerful. It could have worked for Great Britain also, both in the 18th century and the 20th. As I've said elsewhere, Pitt might have been able to sell it. Lord North was never going to consider it, and ultimately, the British rejected it again in 1931.
I can't really make myself believe that an Atlantic crossing was comparable to a passage from Georgia to New York. It looks to me to be four times as long, for one thing. And I've certainly read about a lot of historical figures who lost relatives on an Atlantic crossing.
And I'm not saying it *couldn't* have worked, but rather that, from what I've read of various works from those times, they really did rule it out as not even worth discussing. Perhaps that was just rhetorical because they had had a century of home rule and would not have considered Parliamentary representation a fair trade even if trans-Atlantic travel and communication were as easy as it is today. But I never see them even *arguing* against it: Even a decade earlier, when even John Adams wasn't talking about independence, the argument was just a bald, "Since Parliamentary representation is impossible, our rights as Englishmen require local legislatures."
But I'm sure you're better versed in primary sources than I am, so maybe I've just been unlucky in what I happen to have read -- which is mostly excerpts in places like Sandefur's "Proclaiming Freedom" and Thompson's "America's Revolutionary Mind".
Incidentally I didn't read Roberts as imagining what you call the "federative" solution, which I take to mean America's approach of a federal government with strictly limited authority over constituent sovereign states.* I'd have guessed that to be well beyond the imagination of even the Pitts; as Sandefur points out, Parliament had only recently replaced the *King* and was hardly inclined to imagine that there were limits on its authority. But maybe I underestimate the Pitts.
And of course all I'm really saying is that what didn't happen was unlikely to happen. :-) It's still an interesting exercise. One of my guilty pleasures has always been Robert Sobel's "For Want of a Nail".
Took about a month by sea from New York to London. Took about a month by land if you rode from Georgia.
In your second paragraph, I believe "impossible" was a political statement, not a practical one.
A federation of some sort was definitely on the menu, or at least scribbled on the back of it. Obviously the founders came to it quite intuitively. And the mother country had already tried a form of it, with the personal union of England and Scotland prior to the Act of Union. That was not exactly the same, but it turned out to be nearly identical to what they did in the early Commonwealth (and to a degree today) with the then-dominions.
You are correct that Roberts does not assert this explicitly, but the idea of an imperial parliament has a pretty specific meaning in the history of the empire, so I assumed his meaning tracked with that. It is of course possible that he meant a single parliament for all components of the kingdom as continued to be the case in London, just removed to New York instead. But it seems highly doubtful that the English would ever allow themselves not to have their own parliament (at least to the degree that Scotland has one today, or Florida has a legislature), so I imagine he is using the late 19th and early 20th century term.
I suppose I can just ask him.
Anyway, it's fascinating. I wish he'd written 1,000 more words on it.
I recently finished reading Eric Metaxas book Revolution. Based on what he wrote and what I know the British had become very secular and corrupt and immoral by 1776, while at the same time, the colonies had become very Christian and moral. They saw it as their destiny to create in the United States, a new covenant nation dedicated to living under God‘s law.
Therefore, the revolution was inevitable.
Inevitable is a bit strong, but perhaps highly likely. BTW, Eric's book is sitting right here beside me, and his imprint is about to publish my new book too!
The colonies demanded the rights of Englishmen, no different than if they were physically in England. It was not an unreasonable request, considering that they had never consented to a reduction in those rights simply by virtue of relocation.
The problem from Lord North's point of view was that they were articulating a Jacobite (not Jacobin) political theory, that different parliaments could rule within the same empire under the same king and that no parliament was legitimate apart from the sanction of the electorate. This posed a problem: if you grant the argument in North America, how can you not grant it to an only recently-suppressed Scotland? An imperial parliament representing everyone, with local parliaments in the various constituent areas, was a perfectly good solution to this and was debated extensively in the decades leading up to the Statute of Westminster in 1931. But the English rejected that in 1931 too, however foolish that rejection may have been.
In any case, as you know, the colonies' idea of governance was rejected by Lord North, and then implemented across the empire beginning with Canada in 1867.
If the English had possessed just a tad more flexibility, the relationship might have changed somewhat but complete severance would have been unnecessary. Either William Pitt might have gotten there, but North was never going to.
But the divergence in faith you (and Eric) describe was very real. The founders were the children of the Great Awakening even more than the Enlightenment, and that's a fact that has been downplayed or denied by the academic/Enemedia consensus since shortly after World War II.
Interesting, though of course one must add the requisite caveat that there are no correct alternate histories, only plausible ones.
Left unaddressed is the vexing question of democratization: in the absence of a successful popularly-based independence in "the colonies," how long and to what extent would it have taken for the British Empire have relinquished its oligarchical, soft-authoritarian mode of government?
Additional thought: I took Warner Schilling's class in American foreign relations when I was at Columbia, and his argument was that the Revolution was a product of the British success in eliminating the French threat in North America. Once the colonies were no longer needful of the British defensive umbrella, it changed from being a necessity to a burden.
Of course this was not helped by the bizarre British policies of forcing the colonies to pay for their defense after the war was over, without giving them much of a say in how such policies were to be executed.
That is certainly the British view (reflected in the article), that the colonies were ungrateful after the enormous British exertion to secure their hinterland, and freed up from that threat were able to bit the hand that fed it.
The American view of the post-war taxation, of course, was rather different. And let's be real, the amount wasn't the point. If local parliaments could be bypassed at will by Lord North's government, then the colonists had unknowingly surrendered their rights as Englishmen simply by moving to another part of the same country, separated by an ocean but theretofore not by legal status. Moreover, given the French alliance, it is more likely the colonies would have revolted, with greater success sooner, had the French retained their North American territories (though American expansion might have been more restricted in that case).
As I mentioned in another comment, Lord North saw this as an inherently Jacobite (not Jacobin) argument, which in point of fact it was.
I studied all this at Cambridge so I'm well aware of the British view, but I have to disagree. This was not at all about ingratitude, although the colonies remembered very well the degree to which they had carried their weight during the war and tended to marvel that the British treated that as nothing. This was actually about what the founders said it was: an ever-increasing encroachment on these British subjects' rights, secured in 1688, simply due to geography. That made sense to Lord North. It did not make sense to George Washington.
My guess is, it likely would have also made sense to Pitt the Younger. But alas, the Whigs didn't win until the war had already been decided.
Well, Warner Schilling was no Brit, and he didn’t frame this as “ingratitude,” he framed it as realpolitik. So he arrives at a similar conclusion using the tools of political science and international relations, rather than the far more slender reed of emotional attitudes.
Not do I disagree that there were other factors. In fact there are so many theories that one can hardly argue—and Schilling certainly did not—that there can be a single, all-encompassing theory of the Revolution’s causes.
Schilling merely provided an additional—not an alternate—set of factors that he evidently believed—as a political scientist and international-relations expert—might add to our understanding.
They are valid factors, undoubtedly. I think he is mistaken in his emphasis, not in his statements.
Well, I daresay we are all the prisoners of our own professional deformation, political scientists and international-relations experts no less—and no more—so than anyone else.
I don’t believe I ever suggested—and to underscore the point, nor did Schilling—that the realpolitik explanation was the only or even the main factor in triggering the Revolution. He was mostly using it to illustrate a larger point, which is there are other perspectives than narrowly “historical” ones.
In a class on the history of United States international security policy…it certainly seems appropriate to bring it up—even to the seeming deprecation of other aspects of the same topic—and in the context of your analysis, it seemed pertinent for me to do so as well.
If you think otherwise, feel free to say so.
Not at all. As I said, my disagreement is not with his statement but with his emphasis as I understand it from your recounting. What he describes absolutely played a part.
Stunning overlooked possibilities to be sure, but speculative too.
Speculation tends to be speculative. LOL
That was a perspective that I had never considered.
A very insightful counterfactual by the great Andrew Roberts! His invaluable biographies of Winston Churchill and King George III are essential reading. Make no mistake about it, it’s a wonderful thing the United States became independent. But it is very possible America and Britain could’ve prospered together and history could possibly have been changed much for the better. The British were never willing to treat the American colonists as equals and they looked down on them. They did not give them gradual self-autonomy as they did with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They made one crucial mistake after another that pushed the American colonies to revolt. The American colonies were a huge asset to the British Empire but through bad policies, discrimination and short sightedness, they lost them. The British victory in the French-Indian War emboldened the colonists and convinced them now was the time to make their stand. The British could’ve put all that to rest had they just not played hard ball with the colonists!
If the Whigs had been in power, there might never have been a revolution. That's the one point I was surprised Roberts failed to make, although given space constraints I can understand why he didn't want to digress into a discussion of whig philosophy as it related to the Jacobites.
This article calls for some recommend reading on the British side of the American Revolution!
* The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts
* Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World by Richard Middleton
* From the Battlefield to the Stage: The Many Lives of General John Burgoyne by Norman Poser
* Whispers Across the Atlantick: General William Howe and the American Revolution by David Smith
* The Men Who Lost America: British Command during the Revolutionary War and the Preservation of the Empire by Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy
* With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783 by Matthew H. Spring
* Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War by Friederike Baer
* The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War by Edward J. Lowell
* Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution by Don N. Hagist
* The Other Side of Revolution: British Perspective on the American War of Independence by Kyle Hopkins
* Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War by Thomas B. Allen
* Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff
* Lord North: The Prime Minister Who Lost America by Peter Whiteley
* Titus Simons: Father and Son Loyalists Who Fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812 by Ross D. Petty
* Black Loyalists: Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia's First Free Black Communities by Ruth Holmes Whitehead
* Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence by Alan Gilbert
* Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution by Kieran O’Keefe
* Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer
* Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones
* Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America by Ruma Chopra
* The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson by Bernard Bailyn
* The Loyalist Conscience: Principled Opposition to the American Revolution by Chaim M. Rosenberg
* South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution by Robert Stansbury Lambert
How plausible is it that America even *could* have been represented in Parliament? Most of what I've read about America's position even ten or twenty years before the Declaration, when they were still asserting their rights as Englishmen, makes it sound like it was a given that Parliamentary representation was clearly infeasible given the distance and (frankly) risk from sea travel, which meant that having their own legislatures under the King was the only practical possibility.
I could imagine an Britain a century earlier, before the colonies grew enough for their local legislatures to have momentum, *might* have had the foresight to nip them in the bud by offering Parliamentary representation (if Britain hadn't been preoccupied with Stuart despotism and civil war). But surely the challenges of Atlantic travel were even greater then.
It is spoken of that way now, but it was perfectly feasible, just as our missions to London, Paris, and other capitals were, then and later. The communication problem was no different than that between Georgia and New York, the distance was just greater. It's that distance that made a representative form of government so important to the Founders: they knew that their alternatives were a centralized imperial structure or disunited states in which travel to the (state) capital was not difficult.
Their federative solution was creative and powerful. It could have worked for Great Britain also, both in the 18th century and the 20th. As I've said elsewhere, Pitt might have been able to sell it. Lord North was never going to consider it, and ultimately, the British rejected it again in 1931.
I can't really make myself believe that an Atlantic crossing was comparable to a passage from Georgia to New York. It looks to me to be four times as long, for one thing. And I've certainly read about a lot of historical figures who lost relatives on an Atlantic crossing.
And I'm not saying it *couldn't* have worked, but rather that, from what I've read of various works from those times, they really did rule it out as not even worth discussing. Perhaps that was just rhetorical because they had had a century of home rule and would not have considered Parliamentary representation a fair trade even if trans-Atlantic travel and communication were as easy as it is today. But I never see them even *arguing* against it: Even a decade earlier, when even John Adams wasn't talking about independence, the argument was just a bald, "Since Parliamentary representation is impossible, our rights as Englishmen require local legislatures."
But I'm sure you're better versed in primary sources than I am, so maybe I've just been unlucky in what I happen to have read -- which is mostly excerpts in places like Sandefur's "Proclaiming Freedom" and Thompson's "America's Revolutionary Mind".
Incidentally I didn't read Roberts as imagining what you call the "federative" solution, which I take to mean America's approach of a federal government with strictly limited authority over constituent sovereign states.* I'd have guessed that to be well beyond the imagination of even the Pitts; as Sandefur points out, Parliament had only recently replaced the *King* and was hardly inclined to imagine that there were limits on its authority. But maybe I underestimate the Pitts.
And of course all I'm really saying is that what didn't happen was unlikely to happen. :-) It's still an interesting exercise. One of my guilty pleasures has always been Robert Sobel's "For Want of a Nail".
* Ah, those were the days.
Took about a month by sea from New York to London. Took about a month by land if you rode from Georgia.
In your second paragraph, I believe "impossible" was a political statement, not a practical one.
A federation of some sort was definitely on the menu, or at least scribbled on the back of it. Obviously the founders came to it quite intuitively. And the mother country had already tried a form of it, with the personal union of England and Scotland prior to the Act of Union. That was not exactly the same, but it turned out to be nearly identical to what they did in the early Commonwealth (and to a degree today) with the then-dominions.
You are correct that Roberts does not assert this explicitly, but the idea of an imperial parliament has a pretty specific meaning in the history of the empire, so I assumed his meaning tracked with that. It is of course possible that he meant a single parliament for all components of the kingdom as continued to be the case in London, just removed to New York instead. But it seems highly doubtful that the English would ever allow themselves not to have their own parliament (at least to the degree that Scotland has one today, or Florida has a legislature), so I imagine he is using the late 19th and early 20th century term.
I suppose I can just ask him.
Anyway, it's fascinating. I wish he'd written 1,000 more words on it.