PART I The British Army and the Western Lands The Stage Is Set

By 1760, the great French and Indian War in America between Britain and France was over, with Britain the absolute master of Canada and of all the land east of the Mississippi. The peace treaty of 1763 between the belligerents in the world war (Britain, France, and Spain), known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, completed the ouster of France from the North American continent. For Spain acquired France’s domain in Louisiana west of the Mississippi, in compensation for Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain.

The mighty British Empire now stood master of all it surveyed, and no place more so than in North America. Furthermore, the war had driven from power the peaceful Pelhamite Whigs—led by the Duke of Newcastle, who, along with his brother Henry Pelham and the previously ousted Robert Walpole, had managed to keep England on a course of minimal government and international peace, and of “salutary neglect” of the American colonies. These men had accomplished this feat against the reluctant opposition of Crown and Parliament. Salutary neglect had meant the conscious thwarting of Britain’s grand mercantilist design for controlling and restricting American commerce and industry for the benefit of British merchants and manufacturers. Furthermore, the Walpole-Newcastle policy of laissez-faire toward the colonies had allowed the representative colonial assemblies to wrest effective power from royally appointed governors by wielding the power of the purse over colonial taxes and appropriations, notably including the governors’ own salaries. Thus, from 1720 through the 1750s, the American colonies were virtually de facto independent of British imperial control, an independence bolstered by a libertarian spirit and ideology eagerly imbibed from the radical libertarian English writers and journalists of the period. The hostility of these writers to government in general, and to the existing English government in particular—especially to its designs for power—keenly alerted the American colonists to the slightest signs of aggression by the mother country against their liberties.

For its part, the British government, seemingly all-powerful, was now freed both of the distractions of a two-decades-long conflict with France and of the salutary-neglect policies of the Pelhamite Whigs. The British were now free to bring the fractious American colonists to heel, to impose a comprehensive system of imperial British political and mercantilist control over the colonies. To her surprise, the mother country was to find that the Americans would not sit still while she imposed her grand design that would unleash her imperial power.

2

The Ohio Lands: Pontiac’s Rebellion

The first and immediate problem the British faced was what to do with the Ohio lands, which had been militarily conquered from the French by 1759. Since the European war with France was not to be ended for four more years, the Ohio lands would continue, at least temporarily, from 1759 on under British military occupation.

First to swing into action, with a claim to Ohio lands, was the Ohio Company. In 1749, the Ohio Company, a Virginia company headed by the president of the royally appointed Virginia Council, Thomas Lee, and including the Lee family, the Washington family, and George Mason, induced the Crown to direct Virginia to grant the company 200,000 acres of French-held land at the strategic forks of the Ohio River. Soon Robert Dinwiddie, royal governor of Virginia from 1751 to 1758, his patron, the powerful imperialist the Duke of Bedford, and the powerful Mercer and Carter families were added to the Ohio Company.

Now, with Britain in full military control of the Ohio lands, the Ohio Company naturally swung into action, putting pressure on the Crown and the military for acknowledgment of its claim. During 1760, officials of the company offered Colonel Henry Bouquet, commandant of Fort Pitt, a share in the company. The Ohio Company, however, met formidable resistance among British officialdom. The new governor of Virginia, Francis Fauquier, was trenchantly opposed to the Ohio Company and to land grants in general. Furthermore, the British militia dug in for a lengthy stay and constructed many more forts in the Ohio Valley. Finally, the Earl of Egremont, in November 1761, officially proclaimed a British policy of prohibiting all grants to settlements upon Indian lands, thus blocking the Ohio Company or any other settlement.

As soon as the fighting ended in 1760, General Jeffery Amherst, the British commander, indulged his absolute contempt and hatred for the Indians. The substantial supply of presents that the British had been wont to grant the Indians was suddenly cut off now that France was beaten; moreover, Amherst arbitrarily decreed severe restrictions on the amount of ammunition that could be traded or given to the Indians. With the supply of ammunition, so necessary to their livelihood of hunting, suddenly cut off, the Indians were naturally embittered against the English. When the Indians protested, Amherst savagely told them through intermediaries that should they cause any trouble, “they must not only expect the severest retaliation but an entire destruction of all their nations, for I am firmly resolved whenever they give me an occasion to extirpate them root and branch.” As a typical hard-liner, Amherst scoffed at the suggestion that the Indians might be either capable of causing or courageous enough to create any real mischief. He was therefore heedless of repeated warnings of probable Indian uprisings upon the cutting off of their ammunition.

In addition to cutting off the Indians’ supply of ammunition, Amherst ruthlessly blocked their supply of rum. Not only did he prohibit any sale of rum to the natives, but he also ordered all trading to be confined to the British forts in order to enforce the ban. Also aggravating Indian resentment was the personal arrogance of the British toward them, a striking contrast to the previous friendliness and camaraderie of the French. The Indians were expected to conduct business at the forts and then leave; the English soldiers were forbidden to fraternize with them.

Another Indian grievance was Amherst’s arrogant disregard of English treaties with the western Indians and of the Crown’s own pronouncements, by permitting white settlement and by giving Seneca Indian lands at Niagara Falls to some of Amherst’s officers. The gifts were, of course, made without bothering to purchase the land from the tribes. Alarmed by the threat to their lands, the Indians were further disturbed by the rapid British construction of new forts, especially the one at Sandusky Bay on the southwest shore of Lake Erie. Amherst grew particularly cocky from the ruthless British suppression, during 1761, of a Cherokee uprising in South Carolina.

The western Indians were driven to a point of desperation by the news in early 1763 that their friends, the French, had ceded the whole of America east of the Mississippi to the hated British. Jeffery Amherst simply shrugged off the problem of disturbed Indians: “Whatever idle notions they may entertain in regard to the cessions can be of very little consequence....”

But General Amherst was soon to find out that the consequences were great indeed, for on May 7 the Indians launched a general uprising dedicated to driving the hated British out of all lands west of the Appalachians. Headed by the great Ottawa chief, Pontiac, the “Pontiac Rebellion” began with the massacre of a band of British soldiers near Detroit, followed by the rapid conquest of all the forts in the northern Ohio Valley, including Fort Sandusky and Fort Miamis (now Fort Wayne, Indiana), with the exception of the great fort of Detroit. This conquest was completed by the beginning of June 1763 and included the destruction of a troop sent to relieve Detroit from Indian siege.

Hearing the great news of victory, the Indians further east joined the rebellion. In the Allegheny region, Forts Le Boeuf, Presque Isle, and Venango were quickly captured by Senecas and Hurons, and Delawares and Shawnees had even besieged Fort Pitt by the end of June.

General Amherst perfectly exemplified the classical hard-liner, the eternally “tough” enemy of “appeasement.” Like all hard-liners, he was ignorant of the fears, aims, or motivations of those he designated as the enemy. He knew only that they were evil and contemptible, men easily cowed by the equivalent of a “whiff of grape.” Convinced that they would not dare to resist stern and harsh measures, Amherst found, as hard-liners invariably do, that repression only provoked resistance, and suddenly the despised enemy was striking and winning on many fronts. One would think that the hard-liner, seeing the abject failure of his policy, seeing his “toughness” only provoke a conflict, would have the grace to admit his error and retire from the scene. But the hard-liner has never done so; instead he takes the outbreak as merely an indication that only extermination can be the deserts of such a diabolical enemy. To Amherst, negotiations for peace became more traitorous than ever.

General Amherst reacted to the Indian uprising as might be expected. At first, and for quite a while, he refused to believe that near savages could have the gall to attack, much less endanger posts where British soldiers were stationed. When he finally realized the scope of the war, he could only express amazement. He could not believe that his own actions might have provoked the war; the enemy must be irrational: “It is difficult, my Lord,” he wrote to the British secretary of state, “to account any causes that can have induced these barbarians to this perfidious attempt.” Driven into frenzy, Amherst vowed—as is typical of the hard-liner—ruthless extermination of the enemy. He set upon all-out punishment, and frantically ordered his commanders to take no prisoners. As he ordered one troop, the Indians were to be treated “not as a generous enemy, but as the vilest race of beings that ever infested the earth, and whose riddance from it must be esteemed a meritorious act, for the good of mankind. You will, therefore, take no prisoners, but put to death all that fall into your hands....”

If the Indians were truly subhuman, then any means for their extermination was proper. Accordingly, Amherst, in early July, directed his chief aide, Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary, to spread smallpox among the Indians. Colonel Bouquet, an apt pupil, answered that he would send blankets infected with smallpox as gifts to the Indians. Delighted, Amherst replied that “you will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” One other method was hunting the Indian “vermin” down with dogs, but this proved impracticable because of the scarcity of good English hunting dogs in the colonies.

Thus Pontiac’s rebellion gave rise to one of the great advances of the “art” of modern war: germ warfare. As in the case of other important inventions in history, other great minds were thinking along the same lines: even as General Amherst was adumbrating the concept of germ warfare, his commandant at Fort Pitt had been putting it into practice. Captain Simeon Ecuyer, another Swiss mercenary, generously gave two smallpox-infected blankets to the Delaware Indians. The new theory bore fruit, and soon smallpox raged among the Delawares and the Shawnees and seriously reduced the fighting spirit of the eastern Ohio tribes.

Germ warfare was not decisive, however. The summer of 1763 found all the Ohio country in the hands of the Indians, except for the besieged forts of Pitt and Detroit. The Indians proceeded to ravage the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia; by the end of the year, over a thousand whites had been killed or captured. Unfortunately for the Indians, neither the more northerly nor the southern Indians revolted. In New York, the Iroquois (except for the Senecas) remained pro-British; to the south, the Cherokees were still cowed by the suppression two years earlier, and by the lavish presents given them at a great conference in Augusta arranged by Lord Egremont.

The turning points of the war were Colonel Bouquet’s ability to relieve Fort Pitt, after his victory at Bushy Run in early August, and Fort Detroit’s ability to withstand Pontiac’s siege. Pontiac had always clung to the hope that the beloved French, still occupying Louisiana and the Illinois country, would come to his aid and drive out the English once again. But in October the French commander in Illinois wrote to Pontiac and told him the facts of life; the French had made peace and were indeed leaving, and the Indians had better make peace themselves. His heart no longer in the war, Pontiac offered peace, and the offer was accepted by the commandant of Detroit.

The Indians were ready to quit and make peace. The big question now was the attitude of the British army. Would it make peace calmly and bloodlessly? Or would it insist on bloody vengeance to be wreaked upon guilty and innocent Indians alike in the name of “punishment”? Amherst, no longer a hero, had been happy to hurry back to England in October, leaving General Thomas Gage with the task of “crushing the Indians’ insurrection, and punishing those tribes who have so ungratefully attacked their benefactors.”

Gage’s instincts were certainly hard-line, but he soon realized that a policy of suppressing the western Indians would at least drive them west of the Mississippi into Louisiana and thus end the lucrative British beaver trade with them. The Indians to the east, however, had no such escape route, so Gage sent out two punitive expeditions in the summer and fall of 1764. But Colonel John Bradstreet, leaving Fort Niagara in the summer with a formidable force, had either the wisdom or the naiveté to circumvent Gage’s rather vague orders, and to conclude a just and easy peace with the Shawnees and the Delawares, insisting only on the Indians’ surrender of all their English prisoners. Gage and Bouquet were furious at this failure to wreak vengeance, “to punish these infamous murders” by the Indians. Gage refused to ratify the peace and ordered an attack on the Indians, who at the same time had failed to surrender the white prisoners.

Colonel Bouquet was now sent out, in the fall of 1764, from Fort Pitt, with orders to pillage and kill all the Shawnees and Delawares in Ohio that they could find and to burn all their villages. He was then to force the Indians not only to surrender prisoners but also to “deliver up the murderers” of white traders, to pay a high indemnity to the traders, and to renounce all land east of the Ohio River. Bouquet, however, found out that the Indians had been preparing to surrender their prisoners to Bradstreet, and, out in the field, even the tough Bouquet agreed to forgo punishment for the prompt surrender of captives. By mid-November, with Gage giving him carte blanche, Bouquet had concluded peace with the Delawares and Shawnees in return for the prompt return of white prisoners. Unfortunately, the British insisted on forced repatriation, including as “prisoners” all whites who had grown to prefer Indian life, and half-breed children born in the Indian camps. At any rate, rationality triumphed over repression, and a formal and harmonious peace was concluded with Delawares and Shawnees in the spring of 1765; the only imposed indemnity was to be land granted as compensation to the English traders.

3

The Ohio Lands: The Proclamation Line of 1763

With the French and Indian War completely over, and the northern American continent east of the Mississippi subdued by 1763, the English government faced more insistently the problem of what to do with the western lands. Until now—or at least until the temporary edict of 1761—virgin land had been open to settlement, on various terms and in various relationships to the Indian tribes. But now the British government began to prepare what would be a rude shock to the American colonists. On June 8, 1763, Lord Shelburne, powerful protégé of the Earl of Bute and the Duke of Bedford, and president of the Board of Trade, recommended that the newly conquered land be divided into three new colonies: East Florida, West Florida, and Canada; simultaneously, the vast remaining lands of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were to be reserved completely to the Indians and barred totally from white settlement. Rule over the west was to continue indefinitely in the hands of the British army.

It is incorrect to imply, as many historians have done, that this measure was designed merely to quiet the Indians temporarily in the face of Pontiac’s rebellion. The Board of Trade’s proposal was made months before the Indian rebellion had become known in England. To be sure, the rebellion hastened the English decision, and the board now urged an immediate proclamation reserving to the Indians all territory west of the Appalachians and ousting all white settlers from the western lands. The king issued a proclamation to this effect on October 7; it established East Florida westward to the Appalachicola River; West Florida in the southwest from the Appalachicola to the Mississippi; and Quebec in what was formerly French Canada. Cape Breton Island was added to Nova Scotia, and the region south of the Altamaha River to Georgia. Most important, the proclamation barred any white settlement, present or future, in the lands west of the Appalachians, and placed its government under the military commander in chief. Even voluntary purchase of land from the Indians was outlawed! The proclamation also decreed that Indian lands within the bounds of the seaboard colonies must be voluntarily purchased from the Indians in public transactions.

What was the reason for this astounding British policy, which stunned and deeply angered the American colonists? We have seen one grave flaw in the theory that this was only a temporary way to appease the rebellious Indians; another flaw is that the Proclamation Line continued in force long after Pontiac’s rebellion had been quelled. The Board of Trade later proclaimed its aim to be the altruistic one of protecting and safeguarding the Indians, and many historians have naively fallen for this myth. But surely the contemptuous attitude of the British then and in the past toward the Indians is enough to discredit the idea of a sudden burst of enlightened altruism toward the Red Men. Far more convincing are two motives attributed to the Crown, both economic: (a) a general desire to keep the Americans confined to the seaboard, to continue to provide markets for English manufactures; and (b) a bowing to the pressure of the powerful English fur lobby, which was desirous of keeping the West free of settlers and therefore confined to the fur trade.

On the first point, the British were apprehensive that Americans in the interior would begin to make their own clothes and other goods in their households rather than buy English textiles, so that valuable English markets would be lost. This motive for outlawing further settlement was privately admitted by various key British officials, including John Pownall, secretary of the Board of Trade. For its part, the fur lobby had powerful connections in the English government. Particularly important for the American fur trade was David Franks of Philadelphia, who was connected with John Watts and James DeLancey in the Albany fur trade. The crucial London connection of Franks and Watts was David’s brother Moses Franks, a powerful recipient of government contracts and largesse. There was some evidence that Lord Egremont, who issued the original prohibition on settling the western lands in 1761, was heavily involved financially with Moses Franks.

A memorandum by Lord Shelburne’s secretary, Maurice Morgann, declared the need to confine colonists to the eastern seaboard in order to preserve the West as a source of furs and to keep it as “open and wild as possible for the purposes of hunting.” Thus the fur lobby was able to triumph over the interests of the settlers, as well as over the separate interests of the various speculative land companies, now dismayed to find themselves deprived of all the fruits of victory of a war they had helped to foment. Particularly distressed was the Mississippi Company, formed by the Washingtons, the Lees, and other leading Virginians of the old Ohio Company, who had petitioned the Crown for an enormous grant of land in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

Individual settlers, however, began steadily to defy Crown policy and quietly moved to settle west of the Proclamation Line. The British military succeeded in obtaining orders from Pennsylvania and Virginia to desist from settlement, but these laws and edicts could not be enforced.

If the speculators in western lands were thwarted by the Proclamation Line, the reverse was true for speculators in lands east of the Appalachians, which were now the only lands open to new settlement. A boom occurred in Nova Scotia, on lands seized from the unfortunate Acadians (Benjamin Franklin picked up one hundred thousand acres there), in Pennsylvania, and in Florida. Indeed, many highly important interests in England had speculated heavily in Florida lands, interests that included the prime minister George Grenville himself, the Earl of Egremont, Earl Temple, Charles Townshend, Henry Fox, and Sir Jeffery Amherst. This speculation undoubtedly strengthened their resolve during the war to seize North America rather than the sugar islands of the West Indies.

4

The British Army and the Grand Design

The British rulers, during and immediately after the French and Indian War, confronted the American colonies for the first time in four decades free of the restraints imposed by the liberal Whigs within the government. The Whigs were at last out of power and hence the remaining imperial and Tory factions were able to execute a Grand Design for cracking down on the American colonies. Spurred by the wise Whig (Walpole-Newcastle-Pelham) policy of salutary neglect, and by the right to levy its own taxes, America had been allowed to flourish with a good measure of independence.* Vital checks had been maintained upon British imperial power. Not only were trade restrictions unenforced and taxation levied only by consent of the colonial assemblies, but funds for the colonial executives were supplied only by the assemblies and thus subject to their power. Moreover, virtually no British troops had been stationed in America in peacetime. Troops had been largely confined to colonial militia, raised and paid by the colonial legislatures themselves.

The imperial Grand Design, hatched during the French and Indian War and put into effect as soon as it ended, was a comprehensive many-sided move to subject America to the British power. The vast new domains captured from France and Spain were to be occupied and administered as befitted a mighty imperial power. The laxity of salutary neglect was to be no more; all the mercantilist laws were to be strengthened and, above all, vigorously enforced; the British army was to overawe the unruly colonials by being stationed in America in force. The British army was to keep the French suppressed, rule the newly won western lands, and help a network of royal bureaucrats enforce mercantilist restrictions. To pay for all this the British rulers hit upon a cunning expedient: the Americans themselves were to be taxed for that purpose. Thus the fractious Americans were to be forced to pay for their own suffering; to supply the funds to finance soldiers and customs agents who would enforce restrictions and taxes upon them. And a vast increase in the royal bureaucracy and the peacetime military would thus be established without imposing new levies on the already war-burdened English taxpayer. The Americans would thus be caught in a vicious circle of tyranny: the British army was to be stationed in America, largely to enforce unwelcome regulations and taxes upon them, while the major excuse for the unpopular taxes was to pay for the selfsame army.

It was a clever scheme—for the English imperial power. But the American colonists were not as enchanted with the new dispensation. Somehow, the British argument—that it was no more than justice for Americans to support the army that liberated them from the French threat—failed to impress the Americans. On the contrary, Americans, especially after the first phase of the war for the Ohio Valley, tended to regard the French and Indian War as a war for Britain and not for themselves. The crushing of Canada wasted American resources, oppressed and conscripted Americans, and wrecked their trade with Canada—all to redound to British imperial glory and the profits of London merchants. Furthermore, Americans reasoned that with the French conquered and the Indians crushed, the postwar need for a British standing army was far less, not greater, than before. They could only regard the large new standing army of British regulars as a permanent instrument of oppression. And the events of the Pontiac Rebellion and the Proclamation Line only convinced the Americans of (1) the ineptitude of the British troops as “protectors,” and (2) the use of the army to prohibit American settlement of the tempting virgin lands of the Ohio Valley.

The imperial Grand Design had been formulated as early as the wartime Pitt administration.* For Pitt, conquest and retention of North America were to be logically accompanied by the imposition of imperial power, the ending of salutary neglect, and the stationing of an army in America. Bute, Bedford, and Grenville all had similar designs, and they envisioned Benjamin Franklin as the head of a new overall central government in America. Pitt ordered enforcement of the trade acts in 1760, and when Newcastle resigned in mid-1761, the latter wisely wrote that “I shall certainly in and out of office oppose the continuation of the militia, in any shape, at least after the war is ended. I shall oppose any alteration that may be proposed of... received usage and practice, with regard to... our settlements in America.” Presumably Newcastle was referring to salutary neglect.

During the regime of Lord Bute, the imperial design made further strides. Bute and Parliament made a preliminary decision for a large peacetime standing army in America, which Bute planned to force the colonies to support. A new customs act pushed by Grenville, as first lord of the Admiralty, encouraged British sailors to harass smuggling by promising them shares of the booty from condemned vessels.

The final decision to station troops in America after the war was made by the imperialist Earl of Egremont, brother-in-law of George Grenville and secretary of state for the Southern Department, and by Welbore Ellis, secretary of war, and a follower of Henry Fox. Egremont and Ellis decided in December 1762 that twelve thousand troops would be stationed in America as a regular standing army, and that the Americans would be forced to pay for its support. The decision was based on the model of Ireland, where the Irish Parliament had been compelled by England to pay for the redcoat army that kept Ireland in subjection.

As liberals and opponents of strong imperial and royal power, Newcastle and the Whigs strongly opposed the large army. The crucial debate on the scheme took place in March 1763, when the army budget was submitted to Parliament (somewhat reduced to appease the instinctively liberal country gentry, who tended to oppose expansion of government power and of the budget). The Whigs argued for a huge slash in the army budget and for withdrawal of all troops from America. They thereby echoed American sentiment: the French were now conquered and the Indians controllable by the colonists themselves. Newcastle charged that “such an extensive plan of power, and military influence, was never thought of before in this country.” But the edge of Whig opposition was blunted, as so many times before, by the disruptive influence of Pitt, a maverick out of power whom the Whigs were anxious to bring into unified opposition against the ministry. Pitt, as usual the ultramilitarist and warmonger, attacked the government for not providing a bigger American army. Pitt called for bigger and better military budgets, attacked the “permanent” disarmament desired by Walpole and Newcastle, and looked forward with relish to imminent renewal of war with France, a country displaying the ill grace to continue in existence.

As a partial and immediate means to pay for this extra expense, Bute introduced a domestic excise tax on cider, along with his army budget. The cider tax extended the enforcement of the excise from retail shops to private English homes. Cider was produced by the West Country, the great center of an instinctively liberal country gentry. Here was an issue of basic English liberties—both personal and economic—on which the Whigs could unite with the country gentry in powerful opposition.

William Pitt, though happy enough when in power to impose an excise on beer and general warrants against Dissenters, was now willing to join with the London merchants, Earl Temple, the Whigs, and the West Country gentry in bitter opposition to the tax on cider. The City of London was vehement in opposition, and the lord mayor, the aldermen, and the Common Council of London vigorously and repeatedly instructed their representatives in Parliament to oppose the tax. This pressure was characterized by a contemporary observer as “a proceeding which, though by no means illegal or blamable, has no precedent that we can recollect.”

The tax on cider was able to pass in Parliament despite the opposing coalition. But its lasting significance for America was the depth of the popular and ideological opposition that it engendered in England. Leading the opposition was John Wilkes’ North Briton, which distributed widely and popularized the great slogan “Liberty, Property, and No Excise.” Throughout the West Country, the people rose in virtual rebellion, demonstrating, marching, resisting—and setting a welcome and instructive example eagerly observed by American colonists. Church bells were stilled, thousands marched in bereavement bearing symbols of freedom and mourning, and Lord Bute, throughout the West Country, was hung in effigy. Large bonfires consumed effigies of Bute, and freeholder meetings of protest were held in towns and counties. Above all, the people refused to pay the tax and set upon the hated tax collectors. The government proceeded to send an army to the West Country to subdue the people. But it was finally forced to repeal the provocative tax two years later.

With the West Country in virtual rebellion, Lord Bute was forced to resign as prime minister at the beginning of April 1763. Bute was succeeded by George Grenville. Grenville’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Egremont, continued as secretary of state, and Charles Jenkinson (secretary to Lord Bute), the Earl of Halifax, and the Earl of Shelburne took prominent roles in the new administration—the last as president of the Board of Trade.

The Crown did no better with the crucial part of the financing of the troops: the plan to tax the colonies. For the first time, a tax was to be imposed on the colonists in violation of the ancient English principle of taxation only when approved by representatives of the public. Sparkplug of the plan was Charles Townshend, a highly conservative Whig who had been secretary of war during 1761–62. In February 1763, Townshend was rewarded by the Crown for deserting the opposition Pelham “innocents” and Rockingham’s Whig Club, receiving appointment as president of the Board of Trade. Inspired by the devotion to royal prerogative by Halifax and Grenville, Townshend introduced a bill to tax the colonies, but even the king attacked it as hasty and premature and Parliament rejected the plan at the end of March.

More important, in early March, the Crown, in a masterful piece of tactical management, drove the plan to station troops in America through Parliament with a minimum of opposition. The Crown had managed to defuse the oppostion by playing off the Newcastle Whigs against Pitt (his two major groups of opponents), and by confusing the potentially troublesome West Country gentry. Newcastle was muted by a threatened Parliamentary inquiry into the financial dealings of his previous administration; and the Crown counted correctly on William Pitt’s devotion to militarism to win Pitt’s charismatic support.

Despite the sometimes vehement opposition, the Crown managed to drive through Parliament the principle of a standing army in America, as well as a domestic tax on cider in partial payment thereof. The British decided to station approximately eight thousand troops permanently in North America. The disposition of these troops refutes the thesis of British apologists that the huge increase in the postwar army was needed to keep down the western Indians and to man the forts of the newly conquered interior. Of the existing force in America, the British deliberately dissolved every one of the units of rangers and others established during the war as specialists in Indian fighting. Rangers but not forts were useful in protecting settlers from Indians.*

There were many indications that the British intended to use their army to keep the American colonists in line and to enforce restrictions and taxes there. Maurice Morgann, secretary to Lord Shelburne, along with an associate wrote during 1763, “I have no idea that we want military establishments against the Indians” and “no danger is to be apprehended from the Canadians.” On the other hand, troops were needed “in order to awe the British colonies. The lines of forts so much talked of before the war will restrain the colonies at present as well as formerly. The pretenses for this regulation, must be the keeping of the Indians in subjection....” Another paper by Morgann succinctly summarized the Grand Design: “That the military force on that continent be increased... so that with the aid of a naval force, the whole of the provinces shall be surrounded.... That... under pretense of regulating the Indian trade, a... line be suddenly drawn on the back of the provinces and the country beyond that line thrown... under the dominion of the Indians.... The provinces being now surrounded by an army, a navy and by hostile tribes of Indians... it may be time to exact a due obedience to the just and equitable regulations of a British Parliament.” The use of the army to enforce trade restrictions and taxes in America was particularly stressed by the powerful Lord Halifax, who, after the death of Egremont in August 1763, had become secretary of state for both departments.

It did not take the American colonists long to see what was going on. Colonel Eliphalet Dyer, a member of the Council of Connecticut and the leading lawyer of eastern Connecticut, wrote from London in the spring of 1764 that Parliament “seems determined to fix upon us a large number of regular troops under pretense for our defenses,” with the revenues to be raised from the colonies to support them. Rather than for defense, the army was “designed as a rod and check over us.” And a leading young lawyer, John Dickinson of Philadelphia, condemned the “formidable force established in the midst of peace, to bleed [America] into obedience....”

Enthusiasm for the British troops among the colonists was hardly strengthened by an incident between General Amherst and the Massachusetts recruits stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The troops’ terms of enlistment were up on May 1, 1763; yet the British refused to discharge them. One refusal begat another, and finally the troops refused to serve any longer. The British retaliated by cutting off all provisions to the colonial troops, who were thus forced to buy their own supplies. General Amherst was responsible for forcing the troops to stay, in violation of the Massachusetts Charter, which required consent of the General Court before Massachusetts’ troops could be forced to serve outside the colony.

Since the beginning of the French and Indian War, there had been an appointed commander in chief of the British armed forces in America; and now, in mid-1763, the Board of Trade recommended that the commander in chief also be made military governor of the western territory. The commander—who after 1763 was General Thomas Gage—was also in charge of western Indian affairs. To Newcastle, this military regime portended an upheaval in the colonies, which would expect a similar fate to descend upon them.

We have seen that Townshend’s premature bill for taxing the colonies was defeated, but the plans continued brewing in the upper echelons of the British government. English taxation of the colonies to raise revenue had been suggested by royal officials in America for half a century, but had never been adopted during the Whig regime. The proponents had largely been governors anxious to secure their salaries independently of colonial assemblies, or royal officials asking for troops to enforce customs or other regulations. The latter included Colonel Robert Quary, chief customs officer, and Colonel David Dunbar, surveyor general of the King’s Woods; among the governors, the arch-imperialist William Shirley and Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia were the most insistent. During the war their voices were joined by such military commanders as General Braddock and Lord Loudoun.

In England, during the French and Indian War, Lord Halifax was an early champion of parliamentary taxation of the colonies, and he was quickly joined by Charles Townshend. Halifax suggested a stamp tax, but the most influential and fateful plan for a stamp tax was proposed in 1761 to Lord Bute by the royal bureaucrat Henry McCulloh. So long as the great Newcastle remained as prime minister, there was no chance of approving taxation of America without its consent. But Newcastle’s fall completely turned the tables, and Bute, Halifax, and Townshend began to drive toward English taxation of the American colonies.

Henry McCulloh, one of the chief theoreticians of a stamp tax, was a London merchant who for thirty years had been a Crown official and a power in North Carolina. He tried to impose quitrent payments on the reluctant colonists and participated in large-scale land grants and speculation in land in North Carolina and across the mountains. His transmontane land speculation led him to espouse the British acquisition of eastern Louisiana from the French. In the autumn of 1763, McCulloh, along with a colleague, was assigned to write a draft for a stamp tax on the North American colonies. Of the two drafts, McCulloh’s was the more daring, calling for a broad stamp tax that would finance not only the cost of colonial troops but also an entire royal civil bureaucracy in America. McCulloh’s draft was rejected, however, and the competing bill, which confined the stamp money to financing the standing army, was selected by the Crown at the end of 1763. The draft of the bill was completed the following spring. Caution, however, dictated postponement of the stamp plan for another year.

*The extent of salutary neglect is indicated by the complete absence of condemnation proceedings in the Massachusetts admiralty court between 1745 and spring 1760, and of enforcement against colonial smuggling between 1743 and mid-1764.

*Indeed earlier, as can be seen from the truly ominous dispatch of Massachusetts’ London agent Thomas Bollan in 1756: that the British intended to govern America as they governed Ireland—specifically to keep a standing army there and to demand the right of prior approval of the acts of colonial assemblies. During the same year, Lord Loudoun wrote from New York: “Governors here are ciphers; their predecessors sold the whole of the King’s prerogative, to get their salaries; and till you find a Fund, independent of the province, to pay the governors, and new model the government, you can do nothing with the provinces....”

*See Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution: 1759–1766 (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 88ff.