Patrick Allitt
Subject: Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?
Bio: Professor of History at Emory and Lecturer for the Teaching Company with the Great Courses
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Would You Have Been a Loyalist or a Patriot?
Our speaker to day is Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory where he teaches courses in the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Patrick also lectures for the Teaching Company with the Great Courses. I have taken six of Patrick’s courses and they are absolutely fabulous that are available on their website.
I want to learn from Patrick about why the British government demanded that American colonies pay their fair for their own defense, and why the Crown chose war instead of reconciliation. Americans learn in school why the patriots fought against taxation without representation, but we didn’t consider why many American colonialists preferred King George’s rule.
Patrick can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Patrick Allitt:
The history of the American Revolution has changed greatly in the last 50 years because the historians’ new attention to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and class have caused the event to look different. In particular, it’s now easy to make the case that the revolution was catastrophic from the point of view of African Americans and that it was entirely sensible for them to ally with the British against the patriots.
That in turn makes it more difficult for historians to have an uncritically pro-patriot view of what happened. Some very talented historians have written the history of the revolution from the slaves’ point of view. It’s also true that in the last 50 years, historians have become much more attentive to the loyalists. The traditional historical writing about the revolution paid nearly all its attention to the patriots, under the assumption that they were right and justified.
But now a generation of historians has grown up saying, “Here’s what the loyalists said. Here’s why it was reasonable. Here’s what they did. And here are the severe implications of the decisions they made so that it’s appropriate for us to look at the revolution as much as a civil war within the colonies as merely a battle between right and wrong in which Britain was wrong, the patriots were right, and the loyalists were a bizarre leftover who hadn’t made the appropriate mental adjustments at the right time.”
The last 50 years have been a golden age in the writing about the revolution because so many wonderful books have come out about it giving us a clearer picture than previously.
Larry Bernstein:
Patrick, if you had been living in Boston in 1775, which side would you have joined?
Patrick Allitt:
I would almost certainly have joined the Patriot side because the coercive measures undertaken by the revolutionaries were frightening and draconian. They tarred and feathered people who spoke up for the British. The last Royal Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson had his house burned down and all his property smashed. He lived his whole life in Massachusetts, loved it, and he’d written a history of it. Nevertheless, the Patriots’ attack upon him was severe and brutal. So, I’d have been cowardly enough to stay safely on the Patriot side.
Larry Bernstein:
Patrick, one of your great qualities is that you’re very diplomatic. Why couldn’t you employ diplomatic language to survive and prosper in 1775 Boston while leaning towards the loyalists?
Patrick Allitt:
The nature of a revolution is that it forces people to take sides even when they really don’t want to. The majority of people just want to lead a quiet life. Revolutionaries prevent them from doing so because it’s critical to catalyze public opinion and to force everybody into one side or the other.
Larry Bernstein:
After the war, the loyalists left the country. Many went to Canada, the UK, and the West Indies. But during the war, they didn’t do that. How did they survive during the revolution, which lasted for years?
Patrick Allitt:
The fighting went on from 1775 to 1783, although most of it was over by ‘81 after the Battle of Yorktown. But there were areas in which the majority of the people were loyalists. This is certainly true of New York City, which was occupied by the British after the Battle of Brooklyn in ‘76 and remained a loyalist stronghold from then on. Similarly, when the British occupied Philadelphia in ‘77, a large part of the Philadelphia population was quite content to go over to the loyalist side.
Large parts of the American South were loyalist, so much so that the fighting in the interior of the South was entirely a civil war in which the vast majority of people fighting on both sides were American colonists fighting against each other. So, it wasn’t clear until the fighting was finished and the treaty was made that independence had been achieved. And then, although, as you say, some people did go abroad to England, Nova Scotia or the West Indies, far more people who had been loyalists did in fact stay. Many of them had to pay fines, but they were able to eventually get back into the good graces of their society and remain. Only about 5% or 6% of the loyalists left, and they tended to be the most prominent and wealthy.
Larry Bernstein:
Families were split during the revolutionary war with some siding with the loyalists and others with the patriots. Ben Franklin’s son, William, was a diehard loyalist and the former Governor of New Jersey.
Patrick Allitt:
The Franklin example is the most conspicuous one. Benjamin Franklin spent most of the years leading up to the revolution in Britain and was a bit slow to foresee that the split would come. Although when it did come, he made a decisive choice for the revolution. Whereas his son had enjoyed honors and privileges with his father’s full approval right up to that point, and therefore wasn’t willing to jump away from the society which rewarded him for his good conduct, which suddenly made him a loyalist.
That must have been so strange for people who became loyalists was that conduct that they’d always regarded as good suddenly became bad. George Washington’s military experience was as a British officer in the French and Indian Wars. He thought of himself as an English gentleman, and suddenly the British are the enemy.
If you look at it from the grassroots level, the continuities must have been striking. The vast majority of Americans were farmers. Something like 95% of people lived in the countryside and only about 5% in town. If you were a farmer beforehand; you carry on being a farmer and judge the revolution’s success if your taxes went down. But one of the great shocks of the mid 1780s was Shay’s Rebellion, when a group of Massachusetts farmers said, we’re being taxed higher than we were before.
The people who were most affected were the revolutionary elites. The Americans who became a new political class like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. They suddenly become national leaders, having previously been minor provincial figures. We focus most of our attention on them because the change in their way of life is so dramatic.
Larry Bernstein:
Why did the British government alienate the Americans and encourage revolution, and what lessons did they learn for their other dominions?
Patrick Allitt:
The British Lord North’s government was unimaginative. Rather than making prudent concessions, it took up arms, which was clearly a foolish thing to do because the sheer physical extent of America made it unlikely that even a big British army was ever going to bring it back under British control once blood had been spilled.
The two obvious comparisons are with Canada and Australia. In both cases large numbers of British people settled there and never did have revolutionary wars. The British learned a lesson from the American Revolutionary War. And when in the 1830s, the Canadians began to make the argument for self-government, the British sent out a blue-ribbon commission. They wrote what’s called the Durham Report that recommended the devolution of power to the Canadian provinces. Canada evolved into a self-governing nation within the British Empire, peaceably. The same thing happened with Australia. If only the British government of the 1760s and ‘70s had been more sensible, it probably could have avoided the rift and could have led to one more big self-governing colony. I don’t think that’s unreasonable to think of at all.
Larry Bernstein:
The Americans looked to King George as a savior against Parliament. They viewed Parliament’s jurisdiction over the colonies as an overreach who didn’t represent their needs, but they didn’t deny initially that the king was their rightful overseer. They looked to the king to step in against this unruly parliament. But King George III decided that he would rather side with Parliament than the colonial legislatures. Why did King George III make that decision?
Patrick Allitt:
He thought that on the merits of the case, his prime minister was right. He liked Lord North very much and trusted him. The king was aware that Parliament was full of people who despised him. So, he was loyal to the North Ministry. A reasonable case can be made for what Lord North and the King were trying to do. Once the French and Indian War finished back in 1763, the American colonies were far safer than they ever had been before. Until then, they’d lived under the constant dread of French incursions. But now that dread was lifted. At the very same time that they felt less of that fear, they were asked to pay for the war. That’s something that the British politicians should have been more alert to.
As the American population grew, they could have found ways to put more trust in the Americans and also to honor the democratic traditions in many of the colonies. There was a fairly high measure of self-government and self-taxation. But the King’s view was that when a handful of rebellious subjects in Massachusetts defied him, with the Boston Tea Party, taking stern measures would have the effect of bringing this rebellion to an end and reconciling an otherwise loyal continent. Ever since the early 1600s, this arrangement had worked. The colonies had been willing to subject themselves to British governance. Most of the people living there were of British descent.
Quite often, Americans talked about England as home, even those who’d never been there. What’s remarkable about the revolution, particularly this moment between April ‘75, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and then July of ‘76, 15 months later when the Declaration of Independence was written, is that it’s the period in which a cultural shift takes place. Large numbers of people start thinking of themselves as independent of Britain.
That’s why Thomas Payne’s pamphlet Common Sense is so important, because it ridicules the concept of monarchy. It says to the Americans, “Don’t revere the king. The king is a ruffian. He’s descended from brutal warriors who seized the kingdom by force. There’s nothing sacred or venerable about it and we’re better off without it.” The combination that the king was making war against them and that Payne was providing them with theoretical justification for rebellion were the two things which led to the Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration, most of it after the preamble is an item-by-item indictment of the King himself, who’s depicted as wicked without parallel in history.
Larry Bernstein:
The desire for the British that the colonies pay their fair share of the expense is a legitimate argument. It is the same argument that the Americans currently have in NATO that the Europeans should pay for their own defense. We’re saying in an alliance pay your fair share and be responsible for defending your homeland. In this example, the Indians were still of concern. There are global naval powers enemies in the French and the Spanish. And so, Parliament enacted taxes trying to collect a sufficient amount of money to pay for the defense of this continent and were willing to use the proceeds of the tax to buy American goods. How is there such a breakdown that the Americans found the defense of their colonies so offensive and basic administration so problematic?
Patrick Allitt:
That’s one of the questions which a generation of very talented historians worked on. Gordon Wood, who died recently, was the preeminent historian to ask that question. In his famous book, The Creation of the American Republic, Gordon Wood says, “If ever there was a group of people in the 18th century who lived an easy life, it was the American colonists.” They weren’t subject to oppressive government or taxes. They paid 1/20th as much in taxation as the British and like 1/40th as much as the poor old French peasants.
The British government felt it was entirely reasonable to ask them to pay a little bit more since they were the beneficiaries of British victory in the French and Indian War. But Wood and his cohort of historians go on to say that Americans had been reading oppositional literature written in Britain. A sophisticated form of conspiracy theorizing coming out of prominent British intellectuals who were afraid that the king was going to stamp out their traditional liberties.
Everyone in England had memories of the Glorious Revolution by which the old British tyrant represented by King James II had been expelled. Instead, a constitutional monarchy in the persons of William and Mary had been brought in. Now the claim among these oppositional intellectuals in the early 18th century was that the Hanoverians, Kings George I, II, and III were trying to seize back the absolute power that the wicked old Stuart monarchs had had in the 1600s.
It wasn’t really true, but if you were receiving a constant diet of believable essays alleging this conspiracy, you start to believe them. The Woods generation came up with the idea that it is based on a giant misunderstanding -- the fear that the king was going to make himself an absolute monarch and that America would be put in the position that England had been in before the Glorious Revolution.
Larry Bernstein:
George III decides that his longevity as sovereign of England depends on him siding with parliament.
Patrick Allitt:
George III was extremely accepting of the principles of constitutional monarchy. He was king for 60 years. And in that time, he never vetoed a piece of parliamentary legislation. No one was less vulnerable to the charge of absolutism than George III. We’ve even got essays he wrote as a teenager in which he lays out with great sincerity a theory of constitutional monarchy, which he aspires to uphold. And he always did uphold it. He never was the tyrant who’s described in the Declaration of Independence. That series of claims that he’s tyrannical is completely false. The claims might be made against the British government and the ministry, but they certainly can’t be made against the king himself.
Larry Bernstein:
The French and Indian Wars, to call it a war seems like a joke. They’re minor skirmishes in the woods. The number of Brits and French is trivial. I’ve been in paintball battles that are almost on the same scale as the French and Indian War. A typical battle might have under a hundred Brits and colonialists and 450 Indians. How can we call this a war?
Patrick Allitt:
The most important battle of the French and Indian War was the Battle of Quebec, in which a fairly big British army met and defeated a fairly big French army. And in doing so, seized Quebec, the strategic points on the entire St. Lawrence River, which was the heart of the French Empire in Canada. But you’re right, the parts of the French and Indian War, which took place in the back country of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The battles around Fort Duquesne, the place that’s now Pittsburgh, were very small. On the other hand, victory goes to whichever side can command a monopoly of force and can physically defeat its enemies. And if both sides have small forces, then the small army of the winner lords it over the small army of the loser.
The important point is that it was principally a war in Canada. The eventual success of the British in capturing Fort Duquesne and turning it into Fort Pitt, was a decisive military event after which the French recognized that they couldn’t contest it anymore. On the point of demographics, the population of New England and the population of upstate New York had grown very rapidly in the course of the colonial period. There’d been continuous internal population growth with high birth rates and high survival rates. Whereas by comparison, the number of French settlers in the St. Lawrence Valley was always very low. The French were massively outnumbered in colonists, which meant that the only way the French were going to be able to hold onto their American possessions was by importing armies and they weren’t able to import an army which could win.
Larry Bernstein:
The United States’ population surges over time. There wasn’t really enough land in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales where they had substantial birth rates. They also started getting immigrants from everywhere else in Europe as well. There was no chance that the most dynamic economy in the world was going to remain under the tutelage of a constitutional monarch who did whatever the English parliament wanted. This was not a sustainable outcome in a large continent that would later have five times the population of the UK.
Ben Franklin said that even at the time, it’s just a matter of time before there are more Englishmen here in the colonies than in the UK.
Patrick Allitt:
That’s right. Between 1607 when Jamestown was founded, and 1783 when the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War, the line of settlement only went inland about 100 miles. Nearly all the whites, lived within a hundred miles of the coast. All the cities of any significance were coastal ports. You could go a hundred miles up the Connecticut River or up the Hudson River and find settlements. Movement into the West was still extremely limited at that point.
People like Daniel Boone, who was already in Kentucky by the 1770s, were on the distant frontier, and he was fighting for his life against the Shawnees. What happened next wasn’t foreseeable at the time--Americans spread over the entire continent. Jefferson looked at this and said, “What we need is a nation of yeoman farmers.” he thought, “It’s taken us 200 years to get a hundred miles inland. It takes another 200 years to get another hundred miles inland. And therefore, we’ve got thousands of years’ worth of land into which to gradually increase.” But in the 19th century, the invention of railroads, the California Gold Rush and the Mexican War led to this sudden increase in westward movement, which it was an appreciable force at the time of the revolution, but not a major one.
Larry Bernstein:
It gets to the heart of how you run an agricultural-based economy. You can export agriculture to the extent it’s on a waterway. There was no railroad. You could put the goods on a boat and send it out using a river system and an ocean. Another alternative is you could plant corn, feed the corn to a pig, and then walk the pig to market. But that was the extent of it. Otherwise, that’s why they’re a hundred miles from the shoreline.
Jefferson realized the nature of the American River system and the requirement that America had to not only control the Mississippi, but also to control the port when the Mississippi meets the Gulf. He said, “We got to own New Orleans.”
Patrick Allitt:
That’s right. There’s a passage in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, where he talks about the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers as though they’re parts of Virginia. At the time, they were because the borders extended westward on the map as far as the Mississippi. He had a shrewd understanding of the centrality of the Mississippi to American development and trade.
Larry Bernstein:
You’ve mentioned that it was a predominantly agricultural country. The towns of New York, Boston, Philadelphia are like 15,000 people. My high school is in a town of 15,000 people. I don’t think of it as being important in the context of the world in a time when London was 750,000. England was the big global sea power. They focused on the West Indies sugar islands that were incredibly valuable in terms of taxes and wealth. Tell us about the centrality of the West Indies and how that interrelates with this competition with the French.
Patrick Allitt:
That’s a very good point. When we talk about the revolution, straightaway, we start thinking about the 13 colonies. But the British were thinking about the 26 colonies, if you add in their possessions in what’s now Canada and the West Indies. The revolutionaries themselves also had this in mind, and they sent an expeditionary force to try to capture Canada in the winter of ‘75 and it failed. They sent delegates down to the West Indies to persuade the West Indies to join our side. The Canadians refused because they were convinced that British protection was better. And similarly, the West Indies declined because they were terrified of slave rebellions.
That’s why in the end, only the 13 mainland colonists decided to go with the revolution. It’s also striking that in one of the wars between Britain and France earlier in the century, the British had more or less successfully seized Canada militarily. But when it came time to the treaty, they exchanged Canada for a couple of the little sugar islands, which are microscopic dots on the map because at the time they said, these are more lucrative. And they were right to say so, at the time. The West Indies are one of the places where, because they’re not politically or economically very important today, it’s easier for us to underestimate how economically important they were then and how much of a role they played in British and French strategic thinking.
Once the Americans won the Battle of Saratoga and the French came in on the American side, from then on, the British had to think, now that we’re fighting against France, the thing we must do above all else is hold onto the sugar islands. So, they diverted their military and naval power into the Caribbean to fight against the French. And when Britain thought about what it had done right and wrong in the 1770s and ‘80s, the things it focused on were the Battle of the Saintes in 1782, a naval battle against the French, which enabled the British to hold onto these islands. And the great siege of Gibraltar from 1779 to ‘83 in which a Spanish attempted to seize Gibraltar from the British failed after the British heroic resistance to the siege. In other words, a totally different view of what really matters. If you talk about the island of Dominica and the peninsula of Gibraltar to an American and say, why were these places so vital in the 1770s and ‘80s? Chances are they’ll give you a blank look because it just never comes up in the American textbooks.
Another of the fascinating follow-up stories from the American Revolution is the coexistence of a nation which claimed to be dedicated to liberty and the enslavement of large numbers of people. And the number of slaves increased very rapidly after the Revolution. In 1833, Britain abolished slavery in its empire and they did it peacefully. They did it without a great civil war. Whereas the Americans in the end were only able to get rid of slavery through this horrendous fratricidal civil war.
Larry Bernstein:
In our high school textbook, there’s a graph of the slaves coming to the New World. What it shows is this tiny arrow heading to the United States, this wide arrow heading to the West Indies, and this massive arrow heading for Brazil. It reflects the economics of the slave trade in areas of the world where the returns on hard labor were greater.
Patrick Allitt:
Bad as American slavery was, it was even worse in the Caribbean and Brazil. The death rate was much higher. That meant that far more of the slaves in Brazil and the Caribbean were first-generation slaves who’d got a memory of their lives in Africa and were correspondingly more rebellious. The extraordinary rebellious character of slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil is striking in contrast to the relatively low number of slave rebellions in the United States. By the 1820s, the majority of enslaved people in the United States had no memory of Africa at all. One interesting aspect of the Constitution written in 1787 is that one of the provisos it had was that for 20 years there’d be a moratorium on discussing abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
In that period from 1788 to 1808, very large numbers of slaves were imported. And because they were, it was much more difficult to abolish slavery subsequently than it would have been at the time of the revolution. Obviously the most prominent person whose conscience we study in this respect is that of Thomas Jefferson. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia and in quite a lot of his letters, he voiced to his knowledge that slavery was a dreadful wrong. And at one point he said, “I tremble when I think that God is just and that we’re going to be punished for our sins, of which slavery is the most obvious example.” In 1780, it did sound as though he was quite serious about the possibility of abolishing slavery. And around him, some of the New England states were abolishing slavery. Massachusetts in 1781. But then he wrote the slave code for Virginia.
And by the time he was president, the number of slaves in America had risen very sharply and he completely lost the belief that it was even a feasible project to abolish. So, with the increase in the number of enslaved people, the viability of abolishing slavery diminished commensurately.
Larry Bernstein:
The French wanted to see if the Americans had a chance to win before they would join up. The winning battle that pushed the French into the war was the Battle of Saratoga. Tell us about the role of the French, why they may have had initial misgivings about making this a world war and whether their involvement tipped the balance in the American war of independence.
Patrick Allitt:
To be French in the 18th century was to experience repeated defeats at the hands of the British. Time after time after time in the six or seven big wars of the 18th century, the French came out on the losing side, and clearly the entire balance of power is shifting in the direction of the British. By 1777, the year of the Battle of Saratoga, the French were absolutely salivating at the possibility of restoring some of that lost honor and lost colonies. They were eager to intervene on the American side so long as the Americans showed that they might be able to win. Horatio Gates was the American general whose army won the Battle of Saratoga. It was an incredible surprise that a big British force under the leadership of General Burgoyne was forced to surrender.
It suddenly seemed possible that the Americans would win. Then the French joined in. They’d already been sending covert aid, but now they’re sending explicit aid, including some very effective generals and admirals who joined Washington’s force and who at the decisive moment of the Battle of Yorktown outnumbered Americans involved in the battle and won a decisive victory. French aid was absolutely essential. They transformed its prospects completely.
One of the things that’s so fascinating and astonishing about George Washington is that he was an unsuccessful battlefield general. Every time he went into a pitch battle with the British, he lost famously at New York at the Battle of Brooklyn in ’76 and again at Brandywine and Germantown in ‘77. He drew the conclusion that fighting the British regulars, he was going to lose if he adopted the style of European style battles.
But once he’d got lots of French support, he was able to win the siege of Yorktown. And once French ships were patrolling in the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay so that the British ships couldn’t get in to relieve Yorktown, they were finally able to win a victory. But Yorktown is Washington’s only unequivocal battlefield victory and it’s done with a great deal of French help. The French were then delighted to discover that they’d finally pitched up on the winning side in these colonial wars.
But isn’t it interesting that British defeat didn’t lead to an end to the British empire? Quite the opposite. The British Empire continued to grow. And even with the 20-years war against Napoleon, Britain came out on top.
Larry Bernstein:
The reason for that is the Industrial Revolution kickstarts in England. It becomes incredibly wealthy place in industrial might, ideas and technology. And it brings that technology to the world. And maybe one of the lessons you were mentioning that it took from the American experience was it would have to govern with a felt glove and that it would have to engage with local communities and have them feel like they’re running the show and they needed to be a benign empire.
Patrick Allitt:
Well, certainly a benign empire when it came to governing settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But her hand, they still ruled with a rod of iron when it came to things like the Chinese opium wars or British governance in India where they were a tiny minority and where there weren’t many settlers. The East India Company for the first 150 years of its existence was just a trading company with a handful of trading stations on the Indian coast. But starting in the 1750s, the army of the East India company got involved in politics. And particularly in 1757, also during the French and Indian Wars, they won the Battle of Plassey, which gave the East India Company effective governance of Bengal, an incredibly wealthy Indian province. And the British plundering of Bengal went forward from that point onwards. And then between then and the end of the century, Britain was extending its grip on India and enriching itself enormously.
But as you say, it’s mainly officers of the British East India Company and sometimes a handful of enlisted men and sergeants with large numbers of Indians from one Indian state with British officers fighting against Indian armies from other Indian states because the concept of Indian unity hadn’t yet developed. If ever there was a beautiful illustration of the concept of divide and conquer, the British and India has to be it.
The British general who lost the battle of Yorktown, General Cornwallis, was not disgraced by that defeat. The British government recognized that he’d been put in an impossible position and that all he could reasonably do was surrender. But when he got back to Britain, he was completely rehabilitated. And then he went off to become the Governor General of India where he won a series of victories against Indian princes and contributed in a big measure to extending British power in India.
Larry Bernstein:
What’s interesting is the role of parliament and their willingness to investigate and evaluate mistakes. And this is such an important part of business and life is you don’t win every battle. What can we do better next time? Throughout the Revolutionary War, the generals are brought back to Parliament to explain their behavior. Howe was brought back to discuss the Battle of Brooklyn, and he argued that hat he didn’t have enough guys. It was a bad risk/reward to pursue. He gave his excuses. He wasn’t rewarded with additional responsibilities, but Cornwallis was.
A different example, Captain Bligh was called in front of Parliament to explain why there was a Mutiny on the Bounty. He explained that Fletcher fell in love with a girl in Tahiti, and it’s not his fault. But that said, he was no longer given additional responsibility. And then the British sent a man of war to the Pitcairn Islands to go find Fletcher. I got to give credit to Parliament to do its full investigative work and come to conclusions on a rational basis.
Patrick Allitt:
There were some very gifted people in Parliament in the late 18th century and obviously they’re wonderful to read about. One of them is Edmund Burke, who was himself a critic of British policy towards America. And now he’s regarded as one of the great founding fathers of Anglo-American conservatism. And one of the arguments he made was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He admitted that Britain was far from being a perfect democracy. But on the other hand, he said, look at the way in which it’s grown up organically. It’s clearly effective, does learn from its mistakes, does find ways to reward exceptionally talented people rising up from the lower classes. Let’s not substitute universal democracy, for which there’s no indigenous tradition. Let’s be cautious in the way in which we do it. The history of the development of British institutions is one of a long, gradual, organic development as opposed to the sharp break that the Americans made where they did one white man, one vote democracy.
Even though the American revolutionaries used harsh measures, what they never did was undertake mass exterminations. And if you look at France, Russia and China, in every case, millions had to die for the revolution to take place. And it’s a huge tribute to the American revolutionaries that they did so relatively bloodlessly.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that one of the aspects of Britain was the ability of very talented young men to rise up and be successful. Alexander Hamilton is the quintessential example of that. Tell us about the role of Hamilton as an orphan from the Leeward Islands being a member of leadership from a very young age.
Patrick Allitt:
As a teenager, he was recognized as being very intellectually precocious. A group of businessmen on the islands sent him to Columbia University. While he was doing his studies, the Revolutionary War broke out and he left college and volunteered for the army where as a 19 year old, his organizational ability drew the favorable attention of George Washington who made him one of his aides.
At Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, Hamilton had become the voice of Washington. When Washington said, “Okay, we’ve got to get more supplies out of the Continental Congress.” Hamilton would draft the letter and Washington would read it and say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I think. “
Then he played a very prominent role in the politics of New York State. He married extremely well. His wife brought him social cache, which his birth denied him. And then, when it came time to evaluate the failure of the Articles of Confederation, he and Madison were probably the two leading voices in the Annapolis Convention and then the next year, the Philadelphia Convention, persuading George Washington to reside over it and give it his prestige, persuading Benjamin Franklin and various other luminaries to get themselves elected as delegates to it.
He was only in his early 30s, his brilliant work as the first Secretary of the Treasury and his writing of three very influential reports. The tragedy of Hamilton is that he’d got this extraordinary prickly pride which made him willing to challenge other men to duels. And it cost him his life. And his own son had been killed in a duel a year previously. The folly of the duel stands in utterly bizarre contrast to the incredible, good sense he showed in almost every other realm of his life and conduct.
Larry Bernstein:
Hamilton the musical was sold out and I had to buy tickets on StubHub at an egregious price. I got the last row. And behind me was the standing room only. The curtain goes up. And as the characters begin to sing, so does the woman behind me in standing room only. Wait, you’re not in the show. I want to listen to them, not to you. But what I think is incredible is that this musical made such an impression that many people memorized the words and it educated an entire generation.
Patrick Allitt:
Miranda is an absolute genius. The show is brilliant. It’s comparable in its impact to Gone with the Wind. It’s surprising that Miranda chose Hamilton. The genius of the show is to make Hamilton seem like a man of action when in fact he was an astonishing administrator. Has there ever been a great movie about a bureaucrat? He found a way to put together a sequence of events which emphasize Hamilton as the man of action, the romantic hero.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to move back to military and war plans and the Revolutionary War. Washington reminds me of the Viet Cong. You have a lot of territory and the British’s prime advantage is naval. The United States is a big place and the local people are supportive of the Patriots. Tell us about the fact that Washington could blend into the forest. The Brits were unwilling to do a surge and the limitations of naval power against a continent.
Patrick Allitt:
Your analogy with Vietnam is a good one. One of the American historians who was studying the revolution in the 1970s when the Vietnam War was going on was a John Shy who wrote a terrific book called A People Numerous and Armed in which he makes this exact comparison. He says, think about Washington by analogy with Ho Chi Minh, at the time, an astonishing claim to make. Just as the Americans had to ship their stuff halfway around the world and didn’t have a good enough local base of support. The British had to ship their stuff across the Atlantic. It took months. Shy does some very ingenious comparisons and then exactly shows Washington realized that the most important thing was simply to keep the revolution going.
It isn’t so much that his army blended into the woods as that he kept them together in places where it was going to be difficult for the British to force them into a pitched battle. That’s why Valley Forge plays an outsized role in the American iconography of the revolution. Normally, no one ever remembers the winter quarters of an army, but Valley Forge is vital because he was able to keep the army together.
The most important element of the French alliance was naval power. Think just about the proximity of France to Britain. As soon as France declared war, the British promptly withdrew most of their fleet into home waters. And there was a terrific invasion scare in 1779 where Britain was convinced that the French were going to invade them. Once France was in the war America becomes a secondary consideration, which can’t even rival concern over the Caribbean because of the lucrative character of the sugar islands.
It’s a naval war, which the Americans win by proxy with French help. One of the sources of tension between France and America after that was that the Americans negotiated their own treaty in 1783. Franklin, Adams and Jay weren’t willing to wait for French input into the treaty. Their view was we’ve got to get the British government to concede American independence, which the French might have dragged their feet. The American negotiators achieved independence. It’s a wonderful example of the lack of gratitude in politics.
Larry Bernstein:
The French wanted to make sure that the Americans had a chance to win before they made a world war. But King Louis XVI didn’t like the idea of ending the relationship a king. I’m a monarch. Why do I want to encourage republics? There is that delicate balance between republics make sense there but not here.
Patrick Allitt:
That’s right. The history of foreign policy is that you make ugly relationships for practical reasons. The irony of all this is that the French went into such debt in fighting the American war that it is one of the precipitating factors of the French Revolution, which came along in 1789. The French monarchy was bankrupt which made it weaker and vulnerable to a popular uprising.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about the French Revolution in the context of the American Revolution.
Patrick Allitt:
The French intellectuals of the enlightenment, people like Diderot and Voltaire had been talking about the rights of man and the universal equality of humanity. What they wanted was to achieve within France the same kind of society as they had witnessed being born on the other side of the Atlantic. But the social structure of France and its different traditions and lack of human equality made it difficult to bring that about in a humane way, which caused the French Revolution to veer off.
The Estates-General in August of ‘89 made a universal declaration of human rights. When you read it side by side with the American Constitution and the Declaration, they’re all drawing from the same intellectual inspiration.
Larry Bernstein:
Global wars are expensive. They got to raise taxes. That’s the spark.
Patrick Allitt:
The history of revolutions in the world since the 18th century, we have to be struck by how reasonable they make the anti-revolutionary intellectuals seem. Revolutions generate bloodshed on a horrifying scale. They involve the obliteration of human rights even when they’re taking place with claims that they’re the fulfillment of human rights.
People are instinctively and naturally conservative in most of what they do, and they don’t cope with drastic novelties launched upon them in the name of an ideology.
With the American Revolution leaving aside the slave areas, certainly in New England and the middle colonies, there was a fairly high degree of ordinary citizens participation in politics. There was a reasonable degree of widespread property owning. There wasn’t a massive difference between the richest and the poorest so that they were able to institutionalize what they’d already achieved in practice.
Larry Bernstein:
You keep referring to this as an American revolution. I don’t think it is. The people who were running the country before the war are the same people running the country after the war.
Patrick Allitt:
As a kid in English schools, we didn’t call it the American Revolution. We called it the loss of the American colonies. But it did carry with it the idea that places which had been self-governing under British supervision now became self-governing without British supervision. Implicitly we were minimizing the revolutionary character of it. The new elite were all property owners’ intent upon the protection of their property, and fighting to uphold the laws which maintained their property. So that is what makes it a very conservative revolution.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the importance of dates and geography as it relates to learning about the American Revolution?
Patrick Allitt:
They’re absolutely vital. The geography because people were so much less mobile then than they are now so that the distance between even New York and Philadelphia was a matter of a couple of days. The distance between Charleston and Boston was a matter of weeks. If a British general sends a letter about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which took place in April of 1775, it takes two months to get to England. Then the ministers have to respond to it and it takes another two for the reply to get back and by that time, the entire situation has changed so that the slowness of transatlantic communications made it very difficult for the British to keep up with what was happening on the ground in America. That’s a geographical constraint.
The most important chronological constraint is the fighting started in April 1775. The declaration didn’t come until July of 1776. For 15 months, British and American soldiers were fighting each other and they both claimed they were doing it in the name of the English king. The study of that 15-month period is vital because that’s the period during which more American rebels came to say, “We’re no longer the subjects of the King of England. We’re repudiating his leadership and we’re declaring our independence and it’s right for us to do that.” You can’t grasp that without paying attention to exactly when it took place.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution?
Patrick Allitt:
With the exception of the war of 1812, the British and the Americans have been on very good terms with each other. Normally when one empire rises and another declines, as happened to the Americans and the British in the 20th century, they fight each other. But that didn’t happen in the case of the British and the Americans. Our institutions that we share: the rule of law, our principles of moderation and the Anglo-American tradition, which includes the American Revolution as one of its central parts, is a force for good in the world.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Patrick for joining us.
This is the second podcast in a series on the American revolution. If you missed our previous podcast, it was Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice for President.
Our speaker was H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the biography American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.
Hal explained why Washington was appointed commander in chief of the revolutionary forces, the head of the constitutional congress, and our first president.
Hal praised Washington’s leadership style and why it was appropriate for his times. We also detailed what happened in the Room Where it Happened.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Why George Washington was the Unanimous Choice, here.
