I have been working my way through Alan Taylor’s brilliant “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.” The plural of Revolutions and the adjective Continental are clues to the book’s orientation. It discusses this seemingly familiar territory in a way that makes it new and revealing.
Taylor’s revolutions do not just concern the Colonies and the British, but Patriots and Loyalists, France and Spain, Indians and Slaves and other actors is a complex story of politics, ideology, economics, religion and morality. On page after page we encounter unexpected information, astonishing quotations that change your view of the speaker, and surprising twists.
Who knew the British lost the decisive Battle of Yorktown not because the French fleet kept the British navy from coming to the aid of Cornwallis, but because French attacks on the incredibly profitable sugar islands of the Caribbean persuaded the British commanders that saving them was more important than winning the Revolution.
One of the most interesting chapters concerns the postwar troubles before the infant America designed a viable government in 1787. Though the colonies had won their independence, the new nation faced greatly altered economic circumstances. Americans had grown prosperous by means of mutually advantageous trade with Britain and the continent. Now that had dried up. The colonial paper money was all but worthless. Debt exploded, farmers couldn’t sell their goods abroad at a profit, and American consumers could not afford manufactured imports.
Ruinous inflation was followed by ruinous deflation. Debtors prisons were full, farms were foreclosed, lawsuits multiplied, and income inequality grew dangerously. A New England debtor said he was living in “a country which holds out nothing but poverty and prison.” A New Yorker warned that “the security of American liberty requires a more equal distribution of property than at present.”
Even before the war came to an end, painful austerity led to local insurrections. In Boston, a mob of over a hundred women beat a merchant until he gave over the keys to his warehouse that the ladies then looted of its store of coffee. Elsewhere, similar mobs stole loads of sugar or flour.
In Pennsylvania, wealthy merchants including two signers of the Declaration of Independence, James Wilson and Robert Morris who had helped Washington raise the money to win the war and would later find himself in debtor’s prison, were forced to barricade themselves in a mansion and exchange gunfire with attackers.
Due to debts run up during the Revolution, taxes were higher in the 1780s than those levied by a distant king that had incited the War of Independence. The common man starved, lost their farms and freedom while a few financiers grew fabulously wealthy. In Rhode Island, for example, half of the public debt was held by just sixteen men.
Conservatives, then as now, blamed the victims and claimed the hard times were due to “indolent spendthrifts, who allegedly preferred to shop rather than work. Newspaper moralists especially accused women of ruining their husbands buying imported fashions.’” Sympathy was in short supply when no less a character than Abigail Adams said if the common people were “harder-prest by publick burdens that formerly, they should consider it as the price of their freedom.” Easy for her to say.
Not surprisingly, many began to feel the Revolution has been a poor bargain. In some jurisdictions, local militias blocked courts from foreclosing farms and marched on legislatures demanding relief from excessive taxes. In South Carolina, a debtor “forced an arresting sheriff to eat his writ.”
By and by, the aggrieved resorted to political action rather than armed insurrection. Slates of debt relief candidates from the countryside beat city candidates put forward by the merchant class and took over state legislatures where they repealed the burdensome taxes.
Conservatives took this as a sign that the Revolution had created the threat of anarchy by providing ”too much democracy.” Washington concluded that the people “left to themselves are unfit for their own government.” He, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay exchanged letters expressing the worry men of “great property might need a king’s protection.”
Instead, men of great property eventually contrived a government designed to curb the power of the common people by means still familiar today –the electoral college, a powerful executive and elitist Senate modeled on monarch and House of Lords, and other checks and balances whose intention was not exactly democratic empowerment of the masses.
We are used to being told that some dire political or economic folly can’t happen here, but history reminds s that some fairly alarming things have already happened here. And as the saying goes, if history doesn’t repeat itself it does rhyme. This book suggests our own feckless leaders, their racial prejudices, tolerance for dangerous levels of debt and income inequality, lunatic resort to mercantilist trade policies, and a looming risk of class warfare have precedents.
Alan Taylor’s description of where we have been may not tell us what to do next but certainly suggests some errors to avoid. “American Revolutions” is a revelation, and a rattling good read as our vanquished British forebears might have put it.