American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750 - 1804 by Alan Taylor

    American Revolutions was a creative telling of American History from 1750 to 1804, which told the story of the split of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain in chapters like "land," "allies," and "wests" that sought to thematically cover the Revolution while also moving chronologically. That was cool. Otherwise, the book was just a solid survey of the American Revolution period that was pretty good. It felt like a very undergraduate book, and, at least for the purposes of this unit I was doing on the American Revolution, it worked as a reminder book to reorient me to what I already knew, but was otherwise pretty basic.

    One thing that is clear about the American Revolution to me is that it is in large part an issue of the victors not getting the spoils they expected. American colonists fought the French and Indian War, but didn't get what they expected. They thought that victory would mean new lands to settle west of the Appalachians and in Canada, but they were deemed outlaws for settling that land. But British law failed to stop them. New York's population doubled from 80,000 to 168,000 from 1761 to 1771, mostly growing on the frontier. North Carolina's population grew sixfold from 1750 to 1775 and Georgia grew by a factor of fourteen. Colonists were having lots of babies and creating a huge demographic pressure that pushed up against the Appalachian boundary that was once a physical boundary, later a diplomatic boundary with the French, and by the mid-1760s, was just a flimsy internal boundary that could no longer be enforced.

    While most American focus is on why the Thirteen Colonies rebelled, it is just as interesting to learn about why the other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean didn't rebel. In Canada, it was mainly because Britain granted the French new liberties that had never been granted before in the Protestant empire: allowing Catholics to own land and serve in government. They also enlarged Quebec to extend south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. With so many fewer people (so no demographic pressures to settle), the French-Canadians didn't have much reason in rebel. Their lives got better when they entered the British empire, since they entered a republic where they could participate in government and were enriched by entering a larger, freer trade zone. In the Caribbean, they didn't rebel mostly because they still needed the Redcoats to provide security to keep down the slave population. Whereas slaves made up about 40% of people in the southern portion of the Thirteen Colonies, they made up over 90% in the Caribbean, well past the threshold that the slavers could manage without government help.

    So, it looks like there were six big laws that connect the post-French and Indian War revenue-raising attempts to the Revolutionary War protest against "taxation without representation." They are the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts. After the French and Indian War, the British intended to maintain a 10,000-strong army in North America. In order to raise the revenue to pay for that army (as well as to pay down the national debt that had ballooned during the war), the British taxed sugar exports from the Caribbean. This hit at the same time as a post-war economic downturn in North America, and led to boycotts.  At the same time, Britain his the colonies with the Currency Act of 1764, which more tightly controlled the production of paper money, exacerbating the economic downturn by essentially doing the 18th century version of a modern-day Fed raising interest rates. Then, in 1765, the Quartering Act required colonial authorities to pay the costs of housing and feeding British soldiers, and was resisted and circumvented in all colonies except Pennsylvania. In the same year, the Stamp Act directly taxed Americans and required that basically all printed materials be printed on specific paper from London that was embossed with a stamp. This was also extremely unpopular and spawned the "no taxation without representation" outcry, since no American consented to the tax. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed. This one was interesting because it actually reduced the tax on tea in order to undercut tea smuggling from the Dutch East Indies. But colonial merchants, who saw that they were being undercut, were angrier than tea consumers were made happy, and everyone joined a conspiratorial mindset that this was part of a plot to take away American liberty, leading to the Boston Tea Party. Finally, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Britain passed the "Intolerable Acts," also known as the "Coercive Acts," which were five punitive laws that closed the port of Boston, removed Massachusetts' charter (brining it under direct British control), allowed trials to be removed from Massachusetts to Great Britain, brought back quartering (which had lapsed in 1767), and dramatically increased the size of Quebec (thus restricting the frontier). These acts combined to inspire the colonists to hold the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1764.

    I would love to get deeper into more military history. But for now, the American Revolution can be described as this: in 1775, British forces attempted to impose control in Boston. They failed to do that at Bunker Hill. In 1776, the British occupied New York City, the Americans declared independence, and George Washington crossed the Delaware to win victories that did not win the war for the Americans, but prevented the British from winning the war. After a cold winter at Valley Forge in 1777, the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) joined the war in 1778, which required the British to focus forces elsewhere. As the war went on, support for the Patriot cause increased, and the British were unable to recruit loyalists to form militias. While the classic divide is one-third Patriot, one-third Loyalist, one-third neutral, Taylor says it was more like one-third Patriot, one-tenth Loyalist, and the rest were neutral. Without local support, and forced to deal with old rivals, Great Britain was basically not able to win the war by 1778, and fought the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, lost, and signed a peace treaty recognizing American independence in 1783.

    The result of the revolution, according to Lord Macartney, was that without America "the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger." It worked out for Britain to lose the Thirteen Colonies, since it subordinated the rest of the empire in India, Africa, and the West Indies to taxation. The empire was now less ethnically British, but had gained many more people--for example, Bengal had 20 million, more than double the population England and more than seven times the population of the Thirteen Colonies. These people wouldn't be so troublesome in "demanding their rights as Englishmen." The British made good on a 1778 pledge to no longer tax colonists purely for revenue, so in the time immediately after the war, Americans paid higher taxes than Canadians, and dealt with a period of near-anarchy under the Articles of Confederation until the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Westward expansion proceeded, at the great expense predicted by the British, but the Americans were willing to make the investment since they could have the reward. Western warfare would drain revenue for years, and even cost up to five-sixths of all federal expenditures under Washington, but would obviously yield big gains in years to come.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Seven Years' War brought British national debt from 74 million pounds to 133 million pounds, and servicing the debt in the mid-1760s cost five million of the empire's annual eight million pound budget.
• In 1764, the British Empire transferred smuggling cases from colonial courts to vice-admiralty courts, which took away jury trials that regularly favored the accused.
• I thought this was a good quote from the loyalist perspective, Mather Byles, 1774: "Which is better--to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?"
• The English landed on Staten Island on July 2nd, 1776, and brought enough ships over the coming years to require participation of half the Royal Navy, two-thirds of the British army, and 8,000 Hessian mercenaries.
• The women who were camp followers of the Continental Army actually drew rations and pay and were subject to court-martial.
• Deborah Sampson used a fake name to serve for nearly two years in the Continental Army before she was discovered after being wounded. She later got a veteran's pension (paid to her husband) and publicly reenacted her time in uniform to make money later in life.
• In January 1778, Washington boosted recruitment, which was faltering, by endorsing plans to recruit the enslaved in New England states (this plan was stopped in the South), and by the end of the war, Blacks made up a tenth of the Continental Army, double the rate of proportion in the northern population. Southern states considered and shot down similar plans.
• Rhode Island remained independent until Congress barred its trade with the United States in May 1790.
• The early American republic had one of the highest literacy rates in the world with about three-quarters of free American adults being literate. There was just one American magazine in 1785, but 28 in 1795. There were 100 American newspapers in 1790 and nearly 400 by 1810. There were 69 post offices in 1788 and 903 by 1700.
• In 1807, Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper... The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them."
• In New Jersey, women who owned property had the right to vote from 1776 until 1807, when Democratic-Republicans rewrote the law.