Old colony
Hugh Brogan
From Resistance to Revolution Pauline Maier (Routledge and Kegan Paul £4.00) For some years now a new school of historians has been hard at work re-casting the previously-accepted view of the Ameri can Revolution. By this I do not mean that they have succeeded in overthrowing at last the sacred simplicities that pass, in and out of American high schools, for history: George Washington and his cherry-tree, Paul Revere and his night ride, crossing the Delaware and Benedict Arnold. No, it has been, as usual, a closet revolution among the academics. Until recently the school of C. M. Andrews and L. H. Gipson was in the ascendant.
Andrews taught us to concentrate on substantive legal and economic issues; Gipson presented the view from Whitehall, the problems confronting well-meaning administrators, no tyrants they, struggling to govern an intractable heritage brought by too many victories over the French. An unintended result of these emphases was to play down the ideological issues between Great Britain and her colonies. The new school has radically changed this.
Ideology is back. Bernard Bailyn and his followers (of whom Miss Maier is one) have taught us once more to put the clash of principles at the centre of the picture. As good historians should, they have done this less by theoretical argument than by illustration. The abundant documentation at their disposal has enabled them to show, beyond serious dispute, that the colonists' world-view was so deeply impregnated with political beliefs stemming from the Roundheads and the Glorious Revolution that they could not perceive British actions in any other context. And in that context British actions, or at least the actions of the British government, looked increasingly sinister from the end of the Seven Years War onwards. Wise or foolish, guilty or innocent, statesmen's plans, however justifiable at Westminster, or in the general interest of the empire, were invariably measured with a yardstick kindly provided by such Whig theorists as John Locke and Algernon Sidney. This fact was never properly understood in England, where political and ideological history had taken a very different turn since 1688; and so misunderstandings and quarrels multiplied, ending in rebellion and war.
What is needed now, as a matter of historiographical urgency, is a study of the rise of the new British ideology, the enthronement of the unreformed Parliament as the palladium of liberty and sovereign of the empire; in the meantime Miss Maier has most valuably put together the Ameri can ideological story between 1765 and 1776. She has subtitled her book 'Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain,' and that sums up her theme very well. She shows how the Americans mostly assumed that the Glorious
Revolution had established certain principles in British government, principles which together made up the fabric of liberty. No taxation without representation was one such, of course; another (not to be underrated) was no popery. More, the Revolution had, it was believed, taught all good Englishmen that they should watch out for the usual signs of an impending plot against liberty: standing armies, like the one James II had camped on Hounslow Heath (not Hownslow, Miss Maier); the overthrow of charters and other ancient rights; bribery and corruption in the legislature. Within this framework of halfthought-Out assumptions every action of English ministers, from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Quebec Act (which recognised Catholicism in Canada) of 1774, looked potentially or actually tyrannical; and British concessions never seemed to be made in the right Whiggish spirit or with sufficient generosity. None of this is especially original; but Miss Maier has made a, real contribution by the fullness with which she has explored and presented the material. Her book is crammed with telling detail, not too much to be readable, but too much to be easily quoted. I can only say, by way of illustration, that her account of the impact of the Wilkite agitation on the course of the American Revolution is the best I know. She shows how deeply the colonists identified with Wilkes and his followers, and how, therefore, the King and Parliament's rebuff of he movement was bitterly felt in America, doing more than anything previously to, prove that George III, sovereign of the line of Brunswick though he was, had the tyrannous temper of a Stuart.
The book has some faults, inevitably. There is a rather pompous parade of footnotes — for example we do not need references to establish the well-known fact that Rousseau drafted a constitution for Corsica. It is at least peculiar that Miss Maier could write an account of the Stamp Act crisis without once alluding to the Stamp Act Congress. More important, she is so concerned to establish her main theme, of the continuity and steady growth of colonial resistance, that she fails sufficiently to allow for the very large number of Americans who were untouched, except occasionally, by ideological considerations, or for the ebb and flow of sentiment. It is clear that British policy had created a crisis that grew steadily graver from 1765 to 1773; but not until the Intolerable Acts of 1774, I think, was the irrevocable turn taken. It was news of those ads, for example, which diverted George Washington from land speculation to revolutionary politics; and there were many like him. Finally, it is possible to feel that Miss Maier is too kind to her radicals. At every point she stresses their discipline, their moderation, their hheralism; but increasingly I came to feel that it was all a matter of degree. The radiCals might congratulate themselves on refraining from murder; but their opponents, Vilified, silenced, furnished with "a Suit of Tarr and Feathers," humiliated, and, in the end, frequently driven into bankPtiPtcy and exile, were not necessarily wrong to disagree. Nor is the ideological good faith of such a man as Samuel Adams, failure that he was at everything save demagoguery, to be taken on trust. But basically this is an excellent book, to be read and pondered with profit by all students of the American Revolution.
Previous page
