The French and Indian War
"You know England," continued Candide, after a pause: "are they as mad there as they are in France?"
"Yes," said Martin, "but theirs is another kind of folly. You realise, of course, that these two nations are fighting over a few acres of snow on the borders of Canada, and that they spend more money on this glorious war than the whole of Canada is worth. To decide whether there are more people who ought to be locked up in one country than in the other exceeds my feeble powers[.]" (Candide, translated by John Butt, Penguin, 1947.)
Thus did Voltaire satirize the French and Indian War in 1759. Like all good satirical quips, it is both deeply perceptive and deeply selective: much more than a few acres of snow were at stake. In fact, the French and Indian War was the American theater of the first truly world war -- what is referred to in European and world history as The Seven Years' War. Most of Europe, most of North America's Indian tribes, and the Mughal Empire in India lined up on the side of either Britain or France and fought it out on every continent save Australia and Antarctica.
But it began in North America as longstanding friction between British and French colonists finally ignited a real conflict. British colonial populations were exploding and moving west, right into French territories, disrupting long-established French-Indian trading networks. In fact, rich Virginia planters, including George Washington, arranged for the colony to grant a half million acres to the newly formed Ohio Company -- a sort of "East India Company" for the fertile Ohio Valley. The Ohio Company demanded French recognition of their claims -- no one much cared to get the local Indian population's permission, let alone recognition. This sparked the war.
Britain had fought a series of wars in the first half of the eighteenth century against France and whoever else held them back -- part of a long litany of European warfare that only ended, if it has indeed ended, with World War II. Wars cost money; money means revenue; and revenue means taxes, largely, and therein lies many a historical rub. But first the French and Indian war itself: it was a brutal fight on all sides -- British, French, and the various Indian tribes throwing in with one side or the other. While British allies in Europe and elsewhere held the line against French-allied forces, Britain poured enough resources into North America to win. Aside from kicking the French out of North America, Britain also managed to wrest India from French semi-control. In the complex negotiations that ended the war in 1763, the Spanish ceded Florida to the British and received the vast tract of Louisiana, to the west of the Mississippi River, from the French. (Later, when Napoleon conquered Spain, he would find himself short of cash fighting the British and just about everybody else, whence came the offer of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson for essentially a song that doubled the size of the new nation -- but let's not jump too far ahead.)
And now the cost, lives aside which is rarely much considered by great powers. The British outspent the French to near financial ruin. Thus, almost as soon as the British had won they began squeezing their comrades-in-arms, the colonists, in order to lower their massive national debt. This squeezing led directly to the American Revolution, which made Britain's victory, at least in the American theater, somewhat Pyrrhic. (French debt, incidentally, led to a thirty-year financial crisis that culminated in the French Revolution.) Moreover, without two great powers to play off of each other, the British victory spelled doom for the Indians, who would from this point on be pushed ever further westward and finally into reservations.
The Big Squeeze
Britain was victorious but utterly desperate for revenue. And, from their perspective, what were colonies for but to shovel revenue homeward? That, after all, is the point of mercantilist colonial enterprise. In short, they wanted a good return on their investment. The colonists, from their perspective, were appalled to be treated as second-class citizens after having shed blood for what they still considered their country, Britain.
"Second-class" is key. British subjects were represented in Parliament where they theoretically had the power to affect policy, including taxation. Unless, of course, those subjects were in the American colonies -- hence the revolutionary motto, "No taxation without representation." It's important to keep in mind that the American Revolution was in large part a tax revolt. In any event, British fiscal needs clashed with British traditions of fair government. The latter never had a chance.
A series of Acts followed that squeezed the colonists, who were already beginning to chafe under the mercantilist system, especially as increasingly industrialized manufactures began to take off. Emblematic of these acts, and possibly the most consequential, was the Stamp Act of 1765. Unlike the previous tariff-based programs, the Stamp Act was the first direct tax on the colonists -- a tax on all printed materials, essentially, which now required purchase of a special stamp. Worse still, much of this revenue went to house the permanent presence of British troops in the colonies. The British saw this as only fair: the colonists should pay for their own defense against Indians and whoever else. The colonists saw it as tyranny. The first Committees of Correspondence and the first colonial congress, the Stamp Act Congress, were created to organize resistance which at this point was not aimed at independence but solely at fair treatment within the British polity.
The British backed down, mostly due to fears of losing colonial markets. In backing down, however, and despite the ferocity of the colonial resistance, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act of 1766 which noted that Parliament had the right to tax anything they liked in the colonies, regardless of lack of colonial representation in Parliament. The short-term crushing need to lower the national debt forced Parliament's hand; more taxes of various types, including famously on tea, came hot on the heels of the Declaratory Act and served only to stiffen colonial resistance. Things fell apart rather quickly.
The Revolution
Not everyone was keen on separating from Britain. Estimates vary, but around a third of the colonists remained Loyalists; the rest called themselves Patriots. Loyalists pretty much fled, leaving what property they couldn't transport to the Patriots. Committees of correspondence among colonial revolutionary elites that had originally coordinated resistance to British repression took on greater importance as the revolution got underway. Almost all levels of society -- from white men to free blacks to white women -- contributed, at least rhetorically, to the revolution. (Those that weren't so inclined had mostly left, of course, often to Canada.) A thing called republican motherhood, which was an imitation of the Roman view that the role of good republican women was to conceive and then bring up solid republican men, spread to some still-debated extent. As one would expect, external threat muted much, though far from all, internal conflict.
Ideological statements were many and varied, but the two most notable were Thomas Paine's Common Sense and, of course, The Declaration of Independence. Paine was an Englishman who played a key role in not only the American but also the French Revolution. (He died penniless and mostly unloved, which is perhaps not unexpected -- revolutions always fall short of their noblest ideals, and no one much wants those ideals's most famous promulgators around, especially when, like Paine, they meant what they wrote.) Common Sense was read by nearly everyone who could read in the colonies, and most agreed that the title was apt: given the widening gap of interests, separation seemed obvious. The Declaration, Jefferson's work in the main, famously gave due respect to the opinions of mankind, something one can usually expect from the relatively powerless, by laying out the mostly accurate bill of complaints that had induced the colonist elite to separate. Perhaps most impressive was Jefferson's replacement of John Locke's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property with those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness, then and now, was the topic of much debate as to its constitution and maintenance, but clearly, to Jefferson at least, what it wasn't was simply the possession of property. Then again, he had lots of property.
Hypocritical or not -- the rights of property-owning white males were what was being secured, after all -- this document has had massive influence on virtually all subsequent political revolutions, as well as international and human-rights organizations. Moreover, despite its hypocrisy to many a modern ear -- which sounded far more dimly, if at all, to contemporaries, it must be recalled -- it continues to inspire, especially as the recipients of these inalienable rights have slowly expanded to include the entire human species, at least rhetorically, for the vast majority of Americans -- and possibly for the majority of human beings now alive, period. This is no mean achievement. Both the Declaration and Paine's pamphlets, especially the later-penned Rights of Man that defended the ideals of the French Revolution, still hold out the promise of a more just arrangement of human affairs; they remain noble in aspiration while also remaining in at least some part unfulfilled.
The war itself was a mostly plodding affair that went mostly badly for the revolutionaries until France gave decisive help, finally exhausting the British, whom, one may imagine, figured gaining India and no small amount of the rest of the world was enough to outweigh an embarrassing loss of cranky colonials. Ironically, the Americans soon forgot how a rag-tag revolutionary army fighting at home via necessarily guerrilla tactics that had to, as Benjamin Franklin put it, "hang together or hang separately," could defeat a professional army of the greatest power on earth fighting far from home. The Americans had two choices: victory or death. The British, however, could simply give up and go home. So the Americans won -- with decisive help from France, to be sure. This was another lesson soon lost on the Americans: there's always a rival power more than willing to help a colony or client state wrest itself from one's grasp. The Americans were naturally not unique in their forgetfulness on these and other scores: much of the history of humanity has constituted "kicking away the ladder" once one's own group, however understood, has ascended.
From the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution
One of the many reasons the Continental Army (that is, the revolutionary army) didn't do as well as it might have was that the various states refused to cooperate much in its support. This lack of cooperation persisted into the first American government, which was instituted via the Articles of Confederation which were drawn up soon after the revolution began and instituted in 1781. In short, what was later called states' rights ruled; federal connective tissue among them was very weak. Among the powers not granted to the central government were an executive, a judiciary, the right to regulate commerce, and the right to levy taxes. Money was raised for what little the central government could actually do via the good graces -- the voluntary contributions -- of the states. Basing a system of government on good graces is never a good idea. Sovereignty rested in the states; the national, unicameral legislature granted one vote per state and required nine states to pass anything falling within the narrow purview of super-state regulation which was essentially limited to declaring war, making treaties, and conducting foreign affairs. Anything except amending the Articles, that is, which required a unanimous vote.
Amazingly enough, some things actually got done under the Articles: rough rules for westward expansion, which was in everyone's general interest and was in fact one main reason for the revolution, were agreed to. Perhaps most importantly, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 ensured that new states would enter the loose union with powers and rights equal to those of the original states. Slavery was prohibited in these new states (in the upper midwest), and while positive noises about treatment of the Indians were duly inserted, their obvious fate was to be pushed ever-westward.
However, the Articles' flaws soon became very clear. Wars, even successful ones, cost money and increase debt, both private and public. Former soldiers and current farmers, usually one and the same, were crushed with debt and flush with unredeemable notes with which they had been paid. Each state tried to solve these problems on its own, and with British markets more or less barred from American merchants, which hardly helped, no one state really had the wherewithal to set things right. Moreover, states were taxing citizens at comparable or even higher rates than the British had. Representation or none, intolerable taxation was a core reason for the revolution; now people like Daniel Shays of Massachusetts led debt-ridden farmers in a desperate revolt (Shays's Rebellion in 1786-7) against what seemed to them a worse state of affairs than what had led the colonies to declare independence in the first place. It was crushed, but state legislatures, though not democratic in and of themselves, were responding to mass pressure and achieving via votes what Shays had tried to achieve by force of arms: more democratic control over property rights. The point had been made: if the new country (or, rather, the new country's elite, one could argue, as too many farmers were taking Jefferson's substitution of the pursuit of happiness for property a bit too literally) was to survive, states were going to have to give up some sovereignty to the central government -- once again, "hang together or hang separately."
These elites or representatives thereof, among whom were some of the most brilliant men of that or any age but no one who was without wealth, gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 for what was ostensibly another attempt to amend the Articles but was soon coopted for a far grander purpose: a new frame of government, the Constitution. The secret negotiations were memorialized by James Madison of Virginia, a lawyerly activity that has had its benefits up to the present day. The very short story is that the Constitution created an aristocratic, oligarchical republic with a strong central government, separation of powers, and many checks and balances, and, under severe pressure to secure ratification, the promise of the immediate adoption of a Bill of Rights in the form of ten amendments to check the power of the new central government itself.
Neither Federalists nor Anti-federalists wanted either a democracy or a monarchy. But within the agreed-upon -- indeed, unquestioned and assumed -- frame of an aristocratic republic, each group (nascent political parties in fact) fought over the relative strength of the new central government. Federalists like Hamilton and Madison, who wrote most of the famous Federalist Papers (collection of op-eds, essentially, but of unusual brilliance and penetration) desired greater centralization of power, often with a burgeoning, trade-based, urbanized, and even proto-industrialized economy firmly in mind. Anti-federalists like George Mason and Patrick Henry, who among many others wrote counter-editorials, feared over-centralization of power at the expense of states' rights, often with the maintenance of a slave-based, rural, agricultural and non-industrialized economy firmly in mind. As usual, people with powerful stakes in different economic systems sought to maintain their power. That any compromise occurred at all should be, and is, generally regarded as a triumph, even though it served only to put off the civil war for about 75 years.
The matter was of course more complex. But these rough constellations of interests, which necessarily touched on the maintenance (or not) of slavery -- which itself nearly scuttled the Convention until it was decided that for purposes of representation slaves would count as three-fifths of an actual human being -- remained the main fault line in American history to at least the Civil War and arguably till well into the twentieth century. Indians were counted not at all; nor had they any role in the new Empire of Liberty until at least 1924 when they were finally granted American citizenship. African slave importation was set to expire in 1808, but domestic slave population growth was such that this limitation didn't threaten this "peculiar institution." In many ways, the U.S. Constitution is perhaps history's best example of kicking the can down the road -- to what extent out of wisdom or expediency is a matter still hotly debated.
The Federalists in Power
The Federalists of the Federalist Papers became the Federalist Party, which believed in a strong federal government. American party names are not always so confusion-free. The anti-federalists, after all, soon organized themselves into an anti-Federalist party called the Republicans, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Lincoln's party, let alone today's Republican party, and which was supported by many Democratic-Republican societies (some called Democratic, others Republican), later morphing into the Democratic Party that persists to this day. One trusts this is clear.
Worry not: the key differences between the Federalists and what will be referred to in this chapter and book, for clarity's sake, as the First Republican Party are entirely clear. Let's summarize and necessarily simplify the differences. The Federalists were:
- pro-British
- pro-centralized power
- "loose constructionists" of the Constitution
- typically but not at all entirely Northern
- generally horrified by the French Revolution of 1789 and of anything that smacked of democracy
- in favor of a strong central bank
- supportive of protective tariffs to incubate domestic industry and economic development, and
- bent on raising sufficient revenue through taxation
All this was in the service of creating a strong commercial republic. Naturally, merchants, bankers, lawyers, manufacturers, and the rich in general loved them. Alexander Hamilton was in large part the party's brain trust; Washington and Adams were also dedicated Federalists as well as the first two presidents. The First Republicans, on the other hand, were:
- pro-French
- pro-states's rights
- "strict constructionists" of the Constitution
- typically but not at all entirely Southern
- thrilled (at least initially) by the French Revolution and what they considered democracy
- suspicious of banks and bankers and of a central bank above all
- protective of a rural economy (including, usually, slavery), and
- wary of excessive taxation
All this was in the service of maintaining an agrarian republic. Naturally, most farmers, including both wealthy plantation owners and family-farmers, as well as the non-rich in general, and even many artisans enamored of the French Revolution, loved them. Thomas Jefferson, as much as anyone, was its brain trust, as well as the third president. (James Madison was in Jefferson's camp, to be sure, but more of a hybrid, at least politically, having argued forcefully with Hamilton for the Constitution.)
Each party quickly came to the conclusion that the other was an existential threat to the values of the revolution that both claimed uniquely to own. Rhetoric, always encouraged by the events it sometimes caused and always reacted to, became quite heated, periodically threatening to destroy the first two Washington administrations whose cabinets was made up of the leading lights of both parties. Many historians have often remarked upon how the founders, hardly unworldly or naive, almost to a man underestimated both the inevitability and potential destructive power of what we call parties and they called "faction."
The Federalists took power first, mostly because no one could imagine a first president other than Washington, the hero of the revolution. Hamilton, a genius as were so many of his contemporaries even under a cold modern gaze, was essentially if not officially his prime minister (he was Secretary of the Treasury), and he had a well-thought-out financial and economic program sketched out above but best symbolized by his famous work of 1791, A Report on Manufactures. In this report, Hamilton revealed himself to be a far-sighted theorist of economic development. Realizing that only well-developed nations with mature national economies and strong militaries find much faith in free trade -- that is, only when they are reasonably sure to profit from free trade -- Hamilton recommended what we'd call the incubation of infant industry, a plan of national economic development for a still-underdeveloped nation-state based on tariffs and subsidies. That is, something not altogether different from the mercantilist policies of Britain against which the colonists had revolted. (In due course, as we shall see, when the United States finally overtook Britain and others and could thus benefit from free-trade policies, it duly insisted on imposing a free-trade regime on economies less developed than itself, yet another instance of "kicking away the ladder.")
Inside Washington's administration, Hamilton and Jefferson struck a bargain: Hamilton got most of his economic program in exchange for moving the nation's capitol to what was then a vast swamp on the border of Virginia and Maryland, and is today Washington, D.C., the first iteration of which was designed by men possessed of the highest Enlightenment values and built mostly by slaves. Hamilton's tax on whiskey was (predictably, one would think) met with a rebellion. This Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, yet another tax revolt, was put down by a show of massive force headed by Washington himself. But it was the French Revolution that really launched the interparty warfare into the stratosphere: Federalists gravitated toward Britain while First Republicans supported revolutionary France. The European warfare that followed, and which persisted into the period covered in the next chapter, caused so much turmoil at all levels of American society, let alone inside the rapidly bifurcating elite, that Washington felt moved in his Farewell Address of 1796 to decry "faction" and, not unrelatedly, warn against "entangling alliances" with European, or indeed any other, powers. We should pause here to note that the fact that Washington both refused to become king (not that he would have gotten away with it, one thinks) and volunteered to relinquish power like a modern-day Cincinnatus happy to return home to do some honest farming, was seen at the time and remains today a major and, perhaps (Cincinnatus aside), a unique event in world history up to that point. Not the finest general, Washington did, as one historian put it, hold the revolution and then the new nation together seemingly by the sheer force of his gravitas and will.
His successor, John Adams, served one tumultuous term during which the United States, almost unimaginably, flirted with war against the far more powerful France, of late the savior of the revolution. Adams showed perhaps too much Puritan morality when he insisted on publishing the secret French requests for the usual bribes required to place US-French relations on a basis more permanent than that of the Treaty of 1783 that had ended the Revolutionary War, redacting the actual names of the diplomats involved and substituting X, Y, and Z; hence, the XYZ affair, which must have left Europe dumbfounded at American prudery. Hamilton, always close to the British, was ready for all-out war, as opposed to the desultory naval skirmishes that marked the war-threatening-games. Adams, however, wrapped up a rapprochement with the French by the end of his term in 1800. Few, obviously, paid Washington's Farewell Address much mind then, and few have ever paid it much mind since.
Domestically, however, two ominous notes were struck under Adams. The first were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These acts essentially tried to outlaw the Federalist's political opposition. The Alien Act allowed the government to deport any foreign national deemed a threat; the Sedition Act pretty much authorized the shuttering of any publication or even public assembly deemed annoying by the administration. The allied Naturalization Act aimed to undermine support for the First Republicans among recent immigrants by extending the time to citizenship from five to fourteen years. Xenophobia and repression were afoot a mere handful of years after the triumph of the Bill of Rights. The First Republicans were having none of it, but their response also boded ill for the future. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the former authored by Madison and the latter by Jefferson, urged federal courts to protect First-Amendment rights, which was surely a proper corrective. But Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution went further: it argued, for the first time in post-Constitutional history, for nullification: the right of a state to nullify, that is, simply refuse to recognize, a federal law. The "hyper-Federalist" Alien and Sedition Acts and the "hyper-First-Republican" Kentucky Resolution were two poles of the same magnet that attracted the Civil War of the future to the origin of the nation. Or so it may seem in retrospect.
Meanwhile, other less spectacular but perhaps even more important matters were literally stalking the land; namely, expanding the Empire of Liberty. One of the few accomplishments of the doomed-to-fail Articles was to ensure some relatively organized basis for expansion. Few, faction aside, doubted that America would or should expand westward, if not also southward and northward -- essentially, until a navy was acquired, anywhere one could reach by walking or riding. In this, again, the nation is hardly unique in human history. But whether one sitting in 2017 approves or not of the fact, it is a fact on which much turns. Our forefathers (and foremothers) were not fools, or at least no more than we are. They, too, could look at a map -- soon to be much improved by Thomas Jefferson -- and see that control of the Mississippi River system and its then un-American port, New Orleans, was utterly critical to spreading the Empire of Liberty across the continent, a thread we will pick up in the next essay.