Penguin History of the United States of America (14 page)

…I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhool-zote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes and no. He who led the young men is dead.
²⁷
It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Nor did he; Chief Joseph spent the rest of his life (he died in 1904) in patiently effective diplomacy, the object of which was to get his people back to their homelands, or at least somewhere nearby. He surrendered, having received generous promises: all were broken, not by the officers who made them but by their superiors (‘White men have too many chiefs,’ was his comment). In the end, after years of suffering, he was able to lead the Nez Percés back to the North-West; but he never again lived in Wallowa.

Naturally enough, the defeat of the last Indian warriors (the Apaches under Geronimo, who ‘came in’ in 1886) did not end the spoliation. In 1890 the decennial census made it seem that there was no more unoccupied land available for white settlement in the United States; but in that very year the Indian tribes were robbed of a further seventeen million acres – one-seventh of the remaining Indian lands – under the Allotment Act of
1887, which Congress had passed solely, its supporters averred, in order to hasten the civilization and happiness of the Indians. It resulted in the Indians losing eighty-six million acres altogether between 1887 and 1934. They were the most valuable acres. Yet the Indians, as they grew poorer, grew also, by a process common in ‘underdeveloped’ countries, more numerous. It had once seemed that the race would gradually cease to reproduce itself. Now more and more Indians came into the world to suffer. Their reservations, narrow and poor to begin with, were less and less able to afford them the means of life. They became ever more expensive charges on the government, which yet continued callous and incompetent – so much so that by the 1920s destitution was bringing about famine. It seemed that the last ruin of the American Indian was at hand. By the same token, the white conquest of the continent, which had begun so uncertainly, so small, so long ago, was complete.

Novus Ordo Seclorum
.

Motto of the United States of America

Many states and kingdoms have lost their dominions by severity and an unjust jealousy. I remember none that have been lost by kindness and a generous confidence. Evils are frequently precipitated by imprudent attempts to prevent them. In short, we never can be made an independent people except it be by Great Britain herself; and the only way for her to do it is to make us frugal, ingenious, united, and discontented.

John Dickinson, 1765

The obligation of each Briton to fulfill the political duties, receive a vast accession of strength when he calls to mind of what a noble and well balanced constitution of government he has the honour to belong; a constitution of free and equal laws, secured against arbitrary will and popular licence, a constitution in fine the nurse of heroes, the parent of liberty, the patron of learning and arts, and the dominion of laws.

George III

Here numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue, and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty.

Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway, London, 25 February 1775

The American colonies are great to this country in general and indeed very justly, as being the principal sources of our balance in trade, and consequently of our riches and strength, by the great quantity of shipping employed, of manufactures vended and of the useful returns of their growth.

Horace Walpole, 1754

On 26 October 1760, King George II died at stool in his closet.
¹
His grandson, enemy and heir, also named George, was twenty-two years old. His reign was to be the second longest in English history, and one of the most eventful; he himself was to play a more important part in politics than any of his successors, although his role in American history was by no means so crucial as legend maintains. A word about his character is in order.

George III was no tyrant, whatever his enemies said. He was devoted to
the British Constitution, and his political virtues leap to the eye if we compare him with those other royal failures, Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II, and explain why he kept his life and throne while they lost theirs. He was above all things open, honest and loyal. Ministers who were true to their royal master’s person and policies could depend on his support. He was extremely hard-working, and gradually acquired an immense political expertise matching that of those other master-managers of eighteenth-century English politics, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) and the Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768). His private life was blameless (that is, single-mindedly uxorious); and since he had the sense to stipulate that the woman chosen for his wife should be uninterested in politics, this trait helped his popularity. Finally, he was a stout English patriot. ‘I glory in the name of Britain,’ he remarked. Not for him the longings of his grandfather and great-grandfather for their dear native Hanover. To him, Hanover was ‘that horrid electorate which has always lived upon the very vitals of this poor country’. His passion for agriculture and a country life earned him the nickname of ‘Farmer George’. These attitudes could only endear him further to most of his subjects. He was an intelligent patron of the arts and learning, and gave a pension to Samuel Johnson.

The King had the defects of his virtues. As a backward, secluded boy he was racked by self-distrust and clung for reassurance to the Earl of Bute (1713–92). Poor Bute was as weak as the King seemed, and at length failed his friend completely. But by then George had matured, and his self-confidence became such that he could for years prop up an appallingly weak Prime Minister: Lord North. Unhappily self-confidence all too often shaded into obstinacy and wilfulness. Furthermore, George thought that change of any kind was incompatible with the survival of his country and her greatness. The convictions he defended with passionate stubbornness were those of a narrow, second-rate intellect. Again and again he employed his political cunning, his powers as King and the respect won by his character (later, the timidity inspired by his madness) to prevent essential reforms.

In 1760 his inheritance was as magnificent as that of any monarch in history. No wonder that George and his bold Britons were full of self-glorification. But the spendour was transient. The next five chapters will explain how the English-speaking world came to split into two great but utterly distinct polities – how Farmer George’s biggest farm was lost.
²

He could not have expected to lose it, coming to the throne, as he did, during an enormously successful war of expansion; and even before that war started in 1756, the British Empire was something to marvel at. The wildest visions of Ralegh, Hakluyt and Captain Smith had long been surpassed. At the mid-point of the eighteenth century Great Britain was strong
enough to crush her last rival and become the leader and arbiter of the world.

Hers was, above all, an Atlantic empire. British ships ventured to China; the East India Company fostered a lucrative trade in South Asia and would soon win the rule of Bengal; but India was to be the heart of the second, not the first, British Empire. George Ill’s principal overseas possessions stretched in a gigantic bow round the grey ocean from Newfoundland, down the east coast of North America, across the Caribbean and the precious sugar islands to the west coast of Africa: a curve of some eight thousand miles. It was an empire built on, by and for trade; and in 1750 that trade was worth more than £20,000,000 annually. The imperial merchant marine was the largest in the world; King George’s subjects enjoyed the highest standard of living. There were fifteen million of them: fewer than the inhabitants of the kingdom of France, but, if various calculations proved sound (as they did), the empire was destined rapidly to overhaul the ancient rival in population as in everything else. Unlike its nineteenth-century successor, and in spite of the presence within its borders of Irish, Africans, American Indians and East Indians, it was strikingly homogeneous, the bulk of its people being white, Protestant and English-speaking. The wide seas acted, not as a barrier, but as a link – for water transport was, in the pre-railway age, far easier, and far cheaper, than land.

Yet revolution was to break out – first in the British Empire, then in the kingdom of France: in other words, in the two most modern, richest, best-governed polities in the world; and it broke out in the more advanced of them first. This was not a coincidence, but historians are still groping for, and quarrelling over, the explanation. It is a large and difficult question. No answer can be final.

Still, the point must firmly be made that it was growth, not decay, victory, not defeat, that touched off the American and French Revolutions. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago pointed out that

It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.
³

With modern historical knowledge, we would have to modify these remarks before ourselves applying them to the French old order; and they would have to be still more sharply qualified before they could be applied to the first British Empire; but there is still much relevant truth in them, worth
pondering. For Tocqueville points to the phenomenon now known as ‘the revolution of rising expectations’. It was such a revolution that undermined the old order throughout the West.

No social system can ever be perfect, and the failings of the old order early became manifest. But it was destroyed by its success. It had been given its final shape by the English and French of the seventeenth century and their greatest statesmen. Their work had been far from fruitless. They had not merely solved, in rough and ready fashion, the problems of religious and civil strife which had plagued their countries; they had not merely made those countries the mightiest and most progressive states in the world. They had created the modern French, British and American nations, whose overriding characteristic turned out to be a restless creativity. This creativity could not long be confined within the political, economic, intellectual and social structure which generated it. The men of the eighteenth century came to expect, and inexorably to demand, more than the seventeenth-century ordering of their world could possibly provide. A home and refuge thus became a prison. Only in the British Isles did it prove possible to break out fairly peaceably, and even there the Irish had a ghastly history. Overseas, the mighty edifice which George III inherited collapsed in tumult and war, and the fate of the French kingdom needs no retelling here.

To be sure, periods of self-criticism were frequent even while the old order was at its height. Montesquieu was only the greatest name among the critics who rose up against the French monarchy between the death of Louis XTV and the Seven Years War. In Britain, the long ascendancy of Robert Walpole drove opposition politicians of all stripes into frenzied denunciations of ‘Robinocracy’ and the decline of British liberty. The classic phrase ‘bribery and corruption’ began to be heard – in North America, among other places. The cry went up that an oppressive Parliament had succeeded the oppressive Stuarts. ‘Power’ (we would say ‘the state’ or ‘bureaucracy’) must be brought under control again by such devices as manhood suffrage, parliamentary reform and freedom of the press. Opposition writers spread abroad an oppressive anxiety, a mood reinforced by the long, undistinguished years of the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1750 fear and worry were growing as another great struggle with France drew near, for many doubted the capacity of the ruling clique to achieve victory, or even to avert defeat. Henry Pelham (1695–1754), the chief minister, was better fitted for reducing the national debt and the size of the navy than for conducting a war.

In spite of all, the underlying mood of mid-century Britain – the right little, tight little island – was one of unlovely and almost bottomless complacency, bred by sixty years’ success in all fields of life. The realm of Great Britain
⁴
was the heart and chief beneficiary of the lucrative Empire. The
gross national product was worth some £48,000,000 annually, £15,000,000 being exported. The countrymen and heirs of Newton, Marlborough, Pope, Hogarth, Chippendale, Kent and Locke, contemplating themselves and such monuments as Parliament and the Bank of England, saw little to criticize. On the contrary, they brooded on their innumerable virtues and on the compliments they incessantly paid themselves. The national mood was well symbolized by the toilsome lawyer Blackstone, whose
Commentaries
attempted to demonstrate the wisdom, consistency and rationality of the Common Law of England, that extraordinary hodge-podge from the deep past. The lower orders congratulated themselves on being freeborn, and on not wearing wooden shoes like backward foreigners. The anthem of the age proclaimed:

To thee belongs the rural reign;

Thy cities shall with commerce shine;

All thine shall be the subject main

And every shore it circles thine.