THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.* NORTH AMERICA has been the theatre of
three contests, which have influenced for all time the fortunes of nations and the destiny of our race. The first was the struggle whose splendid achievements were crowned by the great victory of Wolfe and the conquest of Canada ; the second, the revolt of the Thirteen Colonies and the creation of the United States ; the third, the War of Secession and the abolition of slavery.
It is the second of these momentous events which Mr. Fiske has chosen for his theme, a theme which, though well worn, is far from being obsolete. The history of the American Revolu- tion has been told by a thousand pens, and read by millions of readers. Yet Mr. Fiske writes so tersely and describes so vividly, the tale he has to tell is so moving and dramatic, that we read it once more with interest and profit ; and it will rank with the very best of the shorter, though by no means inferior, works on the same subject. And our author does even better than describe vividly,—he writes so fairly that not even old-fashioned Tories (if any still survive) will find aught in the book to hurt their feelings or wound their pride. While stigmatising, albeit without bitterness, the malignant pig-headedness of George III. and the servile im- becility of Lord North, he is careful to point out that, when the monarch and his Ministers began the arbitrary pro- ceedings which provoked the Colonies to rebellion, the prin- ciple, now universally accepted, that Englishmen beyond the seas had as much right to govern themselves as Englishmen at home, was only just beginning to dawn on the minds of the more advanced of England's statesmen. The King regarded this doctrine as rank sedition, and was no sooner on the throne than he resolved to rule the Colonies as if they were appanages of the Crown. In 1761, and subsequently, he attempted to do in America what, since the Revolution of 1688, no monarch had been able to do in England,—make the duration of Judicial Commissions dependent on the Royal pleasure. In 1762 the Governor of New York was peremptorily dismissed for commissioning a Judge "during good behaviour." In 1764 the Prime Minister introduced into the House of Com- mons a series of Declaratory Resolves, announcing the inten- tion of the Government to raise a revenue in America by requiring all legal documents to bear stamps, varying in price from 3d. to 210.
While the King was coercing the Colonies, he was dis- arming Parliamentary opposition at home by systematic bribery and corruption ; and had he not been withstood in America, personal authority would have become so firmly established, that nothing short of a revolution in the Mother-country could have restored the ancient liberties of the realm.
Wherefore the American revolt was a vindication of liberal principles,—it prevented our limited Monarchy from being converted into something very like an autocracy. So at least thinks Mr. Fiske, and on these grounds he invites us to sympathise with the Colonists in their struggle for freedom ; their cause was our cause, the cause for which Hampden died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold ; their victory our victory. In the course of his narrative, he calls attention to the fact that in those parts of the country
• The American Revolution. By John Fiske. London; Macmillan and Co.
where the people were most English, opposition to the encroachments of the Crown was the most zealous and deter- mined. Virginia and New England were the backbone of the rebellion ; while Pennsylvania, where there was a considerable infusion of the Dutch element, showed great slackness. This is what we should have expected. There is no instance on record of any considerable body of Englishmen submitting to foreign domination or arbitrary rule. When Java was restored to the Dutch, at the conclusion of the great war, the English- men who had settled there broke up their homes and left the country ; so did the English settlers in Florida, when it was given back to Spain ; and the American settlers in Texas only endured the Mexican yoke until they were strong enough to throw it off. In resisting George ILI., the Colonists were obeying an inherited instinct, and acting in accordance with the best traditions of the race from which they sprang.
It must not, however, be supposed that George quarrelled with his American subjects out of caprice or a mere desire to assert his power. The quarrel was begun by Townshend, who passed through a venal House of Commons—elected for the most part by rotten boroughs—a Bill for taxing the Colonies, and then died ; whereupon the contest was carried on by the King, who saw that if the American demand that there should be no taxation without representation were granted, it would be impossible long to resist the cry for Parliamentary reform. If it were wrong to tax Massachusetts and Virginia without the consent of their Assemblies, it could not be right to tax towns like Manchester and Birmingham while they were unrepresented in Parliament. But if the system of rotten boroughs were swept away, the system of kingly corruption would go with it ; "a reformed House of Commons, with the people at its back, would curb for ever the pretensions of the Crown ; and the detested Lord Chatham would become the real ruler of a renovated England, in which George ILI. would be a personage of very little political importance."
Unfortunately for this theory, rotten boroughs survived until 1832. It is, however, probable that but for the excesses of the French Revolution and the Twenty-three Years' War with France, reform would have come much sooner than it did; which is another way of saying that the French Revolution was more potent for evil than the American Revolution for good.
As we have already remarked, Mr. Fiske tries to be fair to everybody, even to George III., the villain of his story ; he never consciously exaggerates, nor aught sets down in malice, and marshals his facts with judicial impartiality. But he errs in calling Mr. Lecky a "Tory historian ;" and his de- scription of the Boston Tea Party as one of the most momen- tous events in the history of the world savours of bathos ; and when he protests that "for the quiet sublimity of reasonable but dauntless moral purpose, the heroic annals of Greece and Rome can show us no greater scene than that which the old South Meeting-House witnessed on the day when the tea was destroyed," we perceive that the author has allowed his patriotism to get the better of his judgment.
Let us briefly recall the facts. Owing to the fierce opposi- tion offered to Townshend's arbitrary taxing measures, Lord North's Government rescinded them all save one, the import duty on tea, which was retained at the instance of the King, who wanted, as he said, "to try the question with America." Up to this time the Americans had evaded the tax by refusing to drink the tea, using instead smuggled tea from Holland. In order to stop this contraband trade, and induce Americans to drink taxed tea, it was proposed to allow a drawback equal to the English import duty on all tea coming from England, a device which made it cheaper than the tea brought by Dutch smugglers from Rotterdam. Nevertheless, the people of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston would have none of it, and entered into a compact to prevent the tea from being landed. The consignees were persuaded not to receive it. Hall, master of the Dartmouth,' which brought a cargo of tea to Boston, was notified with threats not to put it ashore ; and finally, to prevent the tea from being landed by the Custom House officers, fifty men, disguised as Mohawks, went on board the 'Dartmouth' at dead of night and threw her cargo into the sea.
A bold and resolute act, if you will, but hardly worthy of being called heroic and sublime. Even though the tea had been landed awl let rot in a cellar, as was the case with the
two hundred and fifty cases landed at Charleston, American freedom would not have been imperilled, much less lost. It is even conceivable that had the Colonists persevered a little longer in their policy of passive resistance, they might have obtained redress of their grievances without armed rebellion, and won independence without the shedding of blood. The "Boston Tea Party" is memorable because it meant defiance of the British Government. It meant that though Americans did not as yet desire to become indepen- dent, they would suffer no meddling with their domestic concerns, and were resolved to enjoy the utmost degree of self-government compatible with the Imperial connection.
But Mr. Fiske does not confine himself to the political aspects of the Revolution. He tells the story of the four years' war, so full of thrilling episodes and dramatic incidents, and one reads it again in his pages with unabated interest. Lamentable in many respects as that war was, and as all wars must be, it is clear that nothing short of it would have welded the Thirteen Colonies into a single State ; also, that unless the Americans had been very fortunate, the contest might have had a different issue. Supremely fortunate in having for leader a man of great military capacity, infinite patience, and indomitable energy, a Bayard sans peur et sans tache, who was again fortunate in being opposed to Generals of inferior ability, in the whole coarse of the war Washington never once met with his match. To these advantages were added, in the later stages of the contest, the combination of three naval Powers against England, and the active help of a French fleet co-operating with a French army ; without these aids even the genius of Washington and the constancy of his troops would have been in vain.
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