Kings, Kin and Killers
The "American War" and the American Civil War As Extensions Of Britain's Civil Conflict
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The 1774-1784 conflict known as the American Revolution or War for Independence is problematic to describe in absolute terms. The terms “civil war” and “revolution” are differentiated only by taste; one man’s revolution is another’s civil war. Englishmen had been at each other’s throats since the middle of the 17th Century; first there was a war between then England and Scotland, then Parliament and Crown, then England and Scotland and Ireland, then Crown and people, then the Stadtholder of the Dutch came with a half-English army to claim a throne abandoned, then an old claimant landed from France only to be met by another army; the cycle seemed endless. Though they seemed to agree to “foreign” rule repeatedly, the English seemed to irritate each other at least as much as they did others. How was the American War any different from this cycle of protest and bloodletting? How did it affect (or even effect) the American Civil War of 1860-65?
Tories and Patriots: Cultural Ties and Independence
Of course, one of several peculiarities of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 is that it in part avers that there were to be no hard feelings between the Americans and their English cousins once the Americans and English completed the unpleasant formalities of the ongoing war.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them.... We have reminded them … We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred …We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity … and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
While pleasant in Enlightenment philosophical and even Biblical terms, such a declaration was impractical in political ones, and created difficulties when informing the troops. The army, then in the field against a far better equipped and trained foe that not only outgunned them but outnumbered them as well, needed a reason to keep having their heads handed to them in battle after battle. At first, they thought they were battling evil forces that were hiding the true situation in America from George III. They were “patriots” in the same sense that the 16th Century “patriots” did. These early patriots backed Henry VIII against the forces that denied his right to rule as he saw fit, whether or not the Pope liked it. Henry did nothing that practically every other European prince wanted to do, which was to curb the power of the Roman Church to tax (through a legally enforced tithe), while not paying taxes that every other royal subject had to pay; Harry just did it first and had resources enough to fight off the rest of Europe. Similarly, English patriots supported Charles II in the 1641-49 war, and later James II against all comers, especially against the backers of William III. Thus, “patriot” in the English sense meant those who supported monarchy. Washington’s soldiers still called themselves patriots, and were in the field when George’s “rebel” declaration reached them, but the Declaration of Independence simultaneously was supposed to make everything all right again just as soon as they won the war.
But how could it ever be “all right” again? No circumlocutions of logic available in the 18th Century could justify that kind of motivational turnabout to American fighting men. These were largely militiamen, who were accustomed to fighting short, if bloody, campaigns against the aboriginal American Indians in the defense of their homes and property. Their king and their royal governors declared them “rebels,” and Congress told them they were fighting for a whole new country. This would take a while to digest, and in the end it would not go down well.
Worse, the English were raising the stakes. Just as they always had, they raised troops on foreign shores, accepting German soldiers under contract that were under royal obligation to the Elector of Hanover, who was also king of England just then. Referred to in history as “mercenaries,” the Hessian, Bavarian and Thuringian troops arrived in America beginning in 1776. At the same time, British agents and Americans who chose not to seek independence (also known as “patriots” in British history) raised their own units, and formed alliances with Indians, especially among the Iroquois and Hurons around the Great Lakes. They would fight the emerging Americans in a way they were used to, which differed from European fighting styles. In bringing foreign troops, George infuriated the “rebellious” Americans, who originally saw the fighting as being mere protest, not war. By introducing the Indians into the war, England was taking the conflict to a personal, war-to-the-knife level. By raising units of fellow Americans, George was creating a new kind of struggle, one that had all the trappings of the Wars of the Devolution; internecine hatred fanned by conflicts in confessionals, and coreligionists at each other’s throats, destroying each other’s livelihoods.
But still there were ties of kinship with the Old Country that simply would not go away. American “patriots” who were fighting for their independence raided, battled and plundered other American “patriots” who wanted to stay united to England, who did the same. The “Tories” fought the “rebels” throughout the colonies in a thousand fights that didn’t make it into the history books and suffered each other’s presence only grudgingly once the war was done. All the while the frontiers burned as American-backed Indians and backwoodsmen fought British-backed Indians and backwoodsmen. Washington’s army did only a fraction of the bloodletting in the war for independence. The ongoing "civil" conflict caused much of the killing, extending far beyond loyalties to kings or churches, and history rarely adds those casualties. This was nationalist and economic warfare writ small, fought on a continental scale one skirmish at a time.
The American War and the American Civil War
Before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain’s dominant Whigs had been trying to emphasize its manufacturing capacity, lacking land area to do else. James II, with a Tory/Francophile foreign policy that was more interested in land that capital, had tried to downplay mercantile capitalism in the New World by emphasizing the value of agricultural products and production. Seeing that the Americas had practically limitless resources, the successors to James strove to maintain that attitude in the Americas while building up a powerful manufacturing base in Britain. By limiting American trade and manufacturing goods exports to Britain alone, the English kept a tight rein on the growth of American industry that started to strangle expansion and growth. While understandable from an imperial point of view, the Americans by the 1770s weren’t looking back to Britain for everything, and were not in a mood to be on an allowance for flat irons from across the sea while having to sell all its agricultural surpluses to a single market that was prohibitively far away.
By the 1770s, the Tory view of political economy had become popular in the salons of Britain again. This was the Continental viewpoint, and that of the most conservative of Englishmen, Thomas Jefferson and most of the American South. The vast tracts of land worked by slaves earned Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia twice the cash income that New England did when trading its iron wares and other manufactured products. Cash crops such as hemp, tobacco, rice and cotton earned more per worker than the average factory did, primarily because of England’s restrictions on manufacturing trade. But the South was more than pleased with its income, and didn’t mind having to buy its tools and finished goods; they were content that they didn’t need as much as the money-grubbing Yankees. Holding the value of land over labor kept the volume of wealth finite, restricted social mobility, and enabled portable wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few. Christian gentlemen conducted their business this way: the patrician yeoman/farmer tended his crops and bought finished goods with what he could raise—and if he wanted more, he borrowed against another crop. The hardscrabble, cash-first economic view of the Whigs was anathema to European culture and Renaissance philosophical conclusions about the ephemeral value of money.
But the British Isles and New England had relatively little open space in which to make any economic growth at all, and scores of peasant revolts made keeping Englishmen “in their place” difficult to reconcile with the “all equal under the law” philosophy in the long term. Only unlimited social mobility, the one that the Whigs backed, could solve these problems simultaneously, and England was well placed to assure it. Both New and Old England had quantities of coal and iron to make tools, and ancient trees to build ships. This was the root of the political economy of New England and the Middle Colonies (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware), and the dominant view of English political economy away from Court and southeastern England. The Hanovers allowed and encouraged both to flourish in Britain; it took the French Wars (1794-1815), the Market Revolution of the early 19th Century, and the riches of India to fix the value of money over land in British political economy.
In the newly independent Americas, the Constitution split the country on the “all men created equal” phrase from the Declaration of Independence. To make the new government work at all, with all the states ratifying on the first pass, the new country would have to accept two completely different economic outlooks. This “Great Compromise” which predated those regarding states that did not yet exist, fell apart at the end of 1860, when South Carolina led 10 other slaveholding states out of the Union. The 1861-65 war not only ended slavery in the United States, but it ended the socio-economic system that allowed it to thrive, the “peculiar institution” inherited from England which is wrongly restricted to slavery by many. Though civil rights would need more work, the destruction of the slave-based, land-derived political economy of the American South shattered the value of land over labor and capital.
The ongoing conflict between philosophical outlooks in Britain extended to the Americas in political economy, in confessional truths, in the obligations of government and citizens, and in the basic vision of the difference between the leader’s right to rule and their duty to supervise. By 1775, when the American war began in earnest, there was a large enough indigenous population to renew the old battles of England in the New World. The end of the war in 1783 wasn’t enough to end it; that would require a Continental threat that would burn for twenty-one years, and another Civil War four generations later and an ocean away.
The Persistent Past: The Steele Diaries
This book, if all goes well, should be in print on 11 November. Imagine what you might find in an old steamer trunk full of diaries of an American Army General who history never acknowledged…before now? What revelations might someone find, what insights might they gain from someone who served in WWI, WWII, and Korea? What ghosts, what skeletons may arise from those pages? That’s what The Persistent Past is all about: revelations, and a lesson in how your history books are written.
And Finally...
On 30 August:
1139: Pope Innocent II banned the use of the crossbow against Christians in Europe. The ban came about primarily because of the crossbow’s effectiveness and potential to equalize battlefield power, potentially threatening the established feudal system and chivalric warfare by making nobles capable of killing their betters more easily.
1862: The battle that history would remember as the Second Battle of Bull Run, or Second Manassas, ends in Virginia. Fought on the same ground as the First Battle of Bull Run/First Manassas in 1861, the two-day battle, orchestrated by Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson, was a crushing defeat for Union forces under John Pope.
And today is FRANKENSTEIN DAY, observing the birth of Mary Shelly in Somers Town, London, England, on this day in 1797. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), an early example of science fiction that avoided the moral judgement common with fiction writers of her time.
Charles I in 1640s war, not his son Charles II. Charles I was beheaded by Cromwell. Years later Charles II had Cromwell’s body exhumed and had it posthumously decapitated! Revenge for the only execution of a British monarch.
"...the ephemeral value of money."
Still today, some see money as just a plaything, not to be taken too seriously. Others take it as seriously as a batter takes balls and strikes. You only get so many of each, and you'd best work them to your advantage, or you're OUT.