Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic

By Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman and David J. Silverman

The thirteen mainland colonies of early America were arguably never more British than on the eve of their War of Independence from Britain. Though home to settlers of diverse national and cultural backgrounds, colonial America gradually became more like Britain in its political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems, and engagements with the empire. At the same time and by the same process, these politically distinct and geographically distant colonies forged a shared cultural identity—one that would bind them together as a nation during the Revolution.

Anglicizing America revisits the theory of Anglicization, considering its application to the history of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses, at key moments before, during, and after the American Revolution. Ten essays by senior historians trace the complex processes by which global forces, local economies, and individual motives interacted to reinforce a more centralized and unified social movement. They examine the ways English ideas about labor influenced plantation slavery, how Great Britain's imperial aspirations shaped American militarization, the influence of religious tolerance on political unity, and how Americans' relationship to Great Britain after the war impacted the early republic's naval and taxation policies. As a whole, Anglicizing America offers a compelling framework for explaining the complex processes at work in the western hemisphere during the age of revolutions.

Contributors: Denver Brunsman, William Howard Carter, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Anthony M. Joseph, Simon P. Newman, Geoffrey Plank, Nancy L. Rhoden, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman, Jeremy A. Stern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780812291049

Book preview

Anglicizing America

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors:

Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,

Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

ANGLICIZING AMERICA

Empire, Revolution, Republic

EDITED BY

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman and David J. Silverman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anglicizing America : empire, revolution, republic / edited by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman. — 1st ed.

   p. cm. — (Early American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4698-8 (alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 2. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Historiography. 3. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783. 4. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Historiography. 5. United States—Civilization—English influences. 6. United States—Civilization—To 1783. 7. United States—Civilization—1783–1865. 8. United States—Ethnic relations—History—17th century. 9. United States—Ethnic relations—History—18th century. 10. United States—Relations—Great Britain—History. 11. Great Britain—Relations—United States—History. 12. Racism—United States—History. 13. Slavery—United States—History. I. Gallup-Diaz, Ignacio, 1963– II. Shankman, Andrew, 1970– III. Silverman, David J., 1971– Series: Early American studies.

E188.A59   2015

973.2—dc23

2014029115

CONTENTS

Introduction

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman

PART I. ANGLICIZATION

Chapter 1. England and Colonial America: A Novel Theory of the American Revolution

John M. Murrin

Chapter 2. A Synthesis Useful and Compelling: Anglicization and the Achievement of John M. Murrin

Andrew Shankman

PART II. EMPIRE

Chapter 3. In Great Slavery and Bondage: White Labor and the Development of Plantation Slavery in British America

Simon P. Newman

Chapter 4. Anglicizing the League: The Writing of Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations

William Howard Carter

Chapter 5. A Medieval Response to a Wilderness Need: Anglicizing Warfare in Colonial America

Geoffrey Plank

PART III. REVOLUTION

Chapter 6. Anglicanism, Dissent, and Toleration in Eighteenth-Century British Colonies

Nancy L. Rhoden

Chapter 7. Anglicization Against the Empire: Revolutionary Ideas and Identity in Townshend Crisis Massachusetts

Jeremy A. Stern

PART IV. REPUBLIC

Chapter 8. Racial Walls: Race and the Emergence of American White Nationalism

David J. Silverman

Chapter 9. De-Anglicization: The Jeffersonian Attack on an American Naval Establishment

Denver Brunsman

Chapter 10. Anglicization and the American Taxpayer, c. 1763–1815

Anthony M. Joseph

Conclusion. Anglicization Reconsidered

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman

Anglicizing America reevaluates the idea of Anglicization, a seminal theoretical model for the study of early American history. Anglicization explains the process through which the English colonies of the Americas emerged from their diverse beginnings to become increasingly more alike, expressing a shared Britishness in their political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems, and engagements with the empire. Anglicization hinges on two powerful ironies: first, that the thirteen mainland colonies had never been more British than they were on the eve of their War of Independence from Britain; and, second, that this shared Britishness, rather than a sense of American distinctiveness, enabled those colonies to make common cause in the Revolution and the creation of the early Republic.

This compelling, synthetic idea first appeared in the scholarship of John Murrin in the 1960s and has since inspired a host of the most important books in the early American field, including Richard Bushman’s King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, Richard R. Johnson’s Adjustment to Empire, T. H. Breen’s Marketplace of Revolution, Frank Lambert’s Inventing the Great Awakening, and Brendan McConville’s The King’s Three Faces. It has also drawn retorts from those who have argued that the colonies were becoming more particularly American on the eve of the Revolution, a claim recently articulated by Jon Butler in his Becoming America. Regardless of where one stands in the debate, any scholar interested in the early modern empire and the American Revolution must contend with the concept of Anglicization.

The early twenty-first century is an opportune time to revisit the idea of Anglicization. For the past thirty years, early American historians have been drifting away from the traditional centerpiece of the field—the thirteen mainland British colonies and their advance to revolution and nationhood—toward topics that their predecessors usually treated only tangentially. These themes include the British Caribbean, Native Americans, slavery, transatlantic migrations, and other European colonies. Recent scholarship sees colonial America not as the prologue to the United States but instead as a convergence and clash of many peoples and imperial powers across the hemisphere over the course of three centuries. New analytical frameworks have arisen in turn. One framework posits the existence of an early modern Atlantic world connecting the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and the eastern coasts of North, Central, and South America. Another model calls for a continental history of North America centered on Indian country and contests between the various European powers for Indian alliances and resources. These approaches have immeasurably enriched the field by expanding its geographical and thematic range, but the multiplication of topics has led many scholars and students to wonder if Early America remains a coherent field of study.

This quandary is a primary reason for renewed discussion of the Anglicization concept. There is pent-up scholarly demand to restore attention to the American Revolution’s origins, events, and outcomes, as evidenced by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies conference, The American Revolution Reborn, held in spring 2013, which drew a larger audience of scholars and the general public than any other event of its kind in recent memory. Concerns over fragmentation in early American studies make this a ripe moment to explore the applicability of the concept of Anglicization to current scholarly interests such as the Atlantic world and American Indian history. Bringing the concept of Anglicization to these areas of scholarly inquiry invites many new questions.

To what degree did Anglicization shape Britain’s Caribbean colonies, and how did that process influence the Caribbean colonies’ response to the American Revolution? Did the French and Spanish colonies also become more like their parent societies over time, and does the answer help to explain their independence movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? How did American Indian engagement with the British Empire, British material goods, the British market, and British missionaries shape their contests with British colonists? Might one refer to some Indians as Anglicizing too? For excellent reasons, there is no turning back to a time when early American history focused squarely on Anglo-American people and the colonies that became the United States. This volume does not take such a reactionary position, nor does it contend that the process of Anglicization applies to the colonial histories of other imperial powers. Yet highlighting Anglicization will refocus scholarly attention on issues that promise to bring greater coherence to the field. These issues include how the British mainland and Caribbean colonies fit together within a single British imperial system; the extent to which Anglo-American colonists, Indians, and African slaves shared experiences amid their profound differences; and how the early republican United States managed to endure in the absence of a well-developed national identity and in the face of staggering social and political divisions.

Anglicizing America is divided into four parts designed to introduce readers to the theme of Anglicization and then explore its applicability to the colonial, revolutionary, and early U.S. national periods. Part I, Anglicization, opens with a concise 1974 essay by John M. Murrin that defines the idea and shows how it can be used to explain the development of the British colonies, the coming of the American Revolution, and the consolidation of the early Republic around the federal Constitution. The subsequent essay by Andrew Shankman traces how Murrin developed the Anglicization concept over the course of forty years of scholarship in conversation with the emergent trends of the field. Shankman argues that Anglicization was a vital process intimately connected to the momentous changes that England (and then Britain) experienced between the Exclusion Crisis and the Hanoverian succession. The long process of establishing a Glorious Revolution settlement that addressed the religious, constitutional, and financial conflicts of the fractured English seventeenth century allowed eighteenth-century Britain to impose a new degree of imperial order that dramatically shaped its colonial possessions. England/Britain itself underwent Anglicization during the formative years of its long eighteenth century, and its North American colonies, in diverse ways, followed suit.

Part II, Empire, explores how Anglicization illuminates the histories of African slaves, Native Americans, and military affairs, which have been of peripheral interest to most subsequent Anglicization scholars, although not to Murrin. Simon P. Newman’s essay situates the development of plantation slavery in both the Caribbean and the mainland colonies within English labor practices, suggesting that American slavery was not such a sharp break with English methods of labor coercion. In doing so, Newman shows how uncovering the transmission of English influence can stretch and, to some extent, redefine the idea of Anglicization. For Murrin, Anglicization was a process of the eighteenth century, and at its core it remains so in this volume. Yet Newman shows that being English mattered a great deal in the initial decades of the empire, well before the most intense period of Anglicization. The English enslaved others in English ways, providing a way for what, at first glance, appears to have been a very un-English institution to play a central role as the slave societies of British North America began aggressively to imitate variants of English politics and culture during the eighteenth century.

William Howard Carter’s essay discusses how English expectations shaped imperial relations with the Iroquois League. Carter considers the implications when a quintessential early modern state found its ability to influence a nonstate people to be quite limited. Geoffrey Plank’s essay closes Part II by discussing how colonial British societies increasingly relied on Anglicizing ideas regarding military preparedness and action to deal with adversaries, especially Native peoples, who would not yield to British aspirations.

In Part III, Revolution, Nancy L. Rhoden and Jeremy A. Stern examine Anglicization and the movement toward independence in the South and New England. Rhoden traces the conflicts between Anglicans and dissenting Protestants in Virginia and shows how Anglicization could function both as a unifier and as a divider within the empire. Stern provides a careful examination of the eight election sermons delivered in Massachusetts during the Townshend Acts crisis and explores how a thorough embrace of British ideals produced a revolutionary political culture and sensibility in conflict with the British state.

In Part IV, Republic, David J. Silverman discusses how a shared commitment to white American racism was essential to the thirteen colonies’ decision to revolt against Great Britain and band together to form a new nation, a development that he characterizes as a distinct Americanizing trend overlapping with and sometimes reinforcing the process of Anglicization. Essays by Denver Brunsman and Anthony M. Joseph explore the lingering effects of Anglicization in the early Republic. Anglicization merged with an intense postrevolutionary preoccupation with Britain. This preoccupation ranged from revulsion to qualified embrace as Britain began to stand as a bulwark against the violence of revolutionary France. The complex attitudes toward Britain, so stimulated by Anglicization and revolution, influenced central policy questions in the early Republic such as the proper way, if indeed there was one, to build a navy and how, whether, and when to tax the nation’s citizens.

In the Conclusion, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz follows the insight of the concept of Anglicization and contextualizes the various local events and phenomena addressed by the authors by placing them in conversation with larger structural frameworks. While it cannot provide a single explanatory path, model, or route, Anglicization does help us look at a hemisphere over a long span of time and understand and explain the complex processes at work—those that enhanced systemic coherence and those that drove the system to disorder and disintegration. Anglicization focuses on local communities while also exploring their embeddedness within larger structural systems. Gallup-Diaz examines one of Anglicization’s core insights: that by the eighteenth century the British Atlantic world had become a complex multinodal network. In addition he underscores the connections between Anglicization and certain interpretive tendencies present in other scholarly disciplines.

Anglicizing America owes a special debt to John Murrin. The editors and authors, all students of Murrin, have long understood his seminal role in shaping the field of early American history. Murrin is both a brilliant historian and the consummate historians’ historian. It is our hope that Anglicizing America will allow our friends, colleagues, and fellow laborers in the field to appreciate, as we have long done, the profound impact and achievement of our friend and mentor John M. Murrin.

PART I

ANGLICIZATION

CHAPTER ONE

England and Colonial America: A Novel Theory of the American Revolution

John M. Murrin

The American people, everyone now agrees, are a nation. But we are more than a little perplexed about how and when it happened. Although about 170,000 Englishmen crossed the Atlantic to the mainland colonies before 1700, nowhere did they create a society that can accurately be described as just an English world in America. Traversing the ocean did generate startling changes almost immediately. But if the wilderness itself had been the major active agent in these transformations, we would expect all the intruders to have been affected in similar ways. They were not. A more significant force was the sheer absence of people which made replication of England’s sophisticated social structure quite impossible. Drastic changes had to occur, but the settlers did have choices of what to transplant and what to leave behind. Because distinct bodies of colonists selected different options, they created equally distinct societies in their wilderness environment. Not one America but several appeared in the seventeenth century.

Chesapeake society rapidly organized itself around the production of tobacco for sale on the world market. It might be called an agrarian capitalist fragment of England that could in the permissive environment of the New World explore the logic of its own social imperatives with a freedom from restraint never found in the Old World. Its central difficulty remained the quest for an adequate labor force, a need that sustained an astonishing influx of white servants almost until the century’s close. Almost 60 percent of all Englishmen who came to mainland North America before 1700 sailed to Virginia, and possibly over 70 percent went to one of the tobacco colonies. Yet as of 1700 Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina could claim barely more residents than New England, which attracted roughly fifteen thousand people (9 percent of the total), nearly all of whom arrived before 1640. Women provided part of the difference, for only they can bear children. In addition, life expectancy fell in the tobacco colonies while it rose phenomenally in New England. Thus in terms of England’s social spectrum, Puritans seem to have been badly underrepresented in the exodus itself, but by 1700 natural increase had inflated their relative importance in North America far beyond English norms.

As we now realize, Chesapeake society was frighteningly turbulent, racked at times by ugly tensions between large and small planters, masters and servants. The lack of women rendered most of the newcomers demographically useless and condemned most young males to sexual frustrations whose impacts we can barely attempt to imagine. In addition, positions of leadership fell to a small minority of free immigrants at the expense of natives and, of course, the swelling mass of white servants and ex-servants. Instability derived as well from acute poverty and a severe expression of English deference stimulated by the absence of family life. Without families, men do not easily acquire a stake in the future—their own or the community’s—upon which deference ultimately rests. Englishmen had managed to create a society remarkably different from the one they left behind.

By contrast, in erecting their wilderness Zion, English Puritans created the most stable English-speaking polity of the century, but they also cut themselves off from the dynamic of change that eroded Puritan beliefs at home. One basic decision made in the 1630s would absorb most of the region’s intellectual energies for the next century and also intensify New England’s insularity. This was the determination to build a territorial church (embracing the entire populations) while confining full church membership to visible saints (those with proof of election). In other respects, Yankee stability rested upon a family pattern of settlement, ethnic homogeneity, the cohesive powers of village life, and the imperatives of common religious commitment. The wilderness never disproved the dreams of the Old World. Rather it offered the only environment in which they could actually be implemented with a minimum of outside interference. Their eventual failure owed much less to the frontier than inner contradictions present in the attempt itself.

Like New England, the middle colonies were settled largely in family units, but no colony from New York to Delaware ever attained the same degree of cohesion. Religious and ethnic diversity diluted provincial loyalties and seriously weakened local institutions. It injected into political life a persistent bitterness difficult to match in other mainland societies. In New York, East Jersey, and Delaware, settlement patterns became hopelessly intermixed through the Dutch conquest of New Sweden and the English conquest of New Netherland. Instead of coherent fragment of an Old World society, these colonies contained random chips from several European countries. The middle colonies faced the unpromising task of trying to amalgamate antagonistic elements that, for the most part, showed no interest in amalgamation.

As the Glorious Revolution revealed, nothing resembling a coherent American society had taken shape in the wilderness before 1690. The Crown, not the settlers, tried to unite the colonies through the Dominion of New England. Multiple Americas had appeared in the English New World, and the passage of time threatened to drive them farther apart, not closer together, if only by intensifying the initial transformations by which each had become distinct. All had retained portions of their English heritage, but not the same portions. New England greatly strengthened the village while weakening the county and the gentry, and eliminating the vestry. Virginia expanded the role of the gentry, county, and vestry while eliminating the village. Village, county, and gentry were each severely weakened in Pennsylvania, while South Carolina all but eliminated every form of local government except the parish. Economic patterns were equally distinct, especially in the contrast between the staple colonies and the more diversified societies to the north. In a word, the colonies differed from one another about as drastically as they had deviated from English norms.

Yet already the Virginia elite had begun to imitate the English gentry in a way that sharpened loyalties to England despite the simultaneous intensification of the more basic differences that separated the two societies. New England, by contrast, retained far more institutional structure of the Old World, but Puritan convictions reinforced a painful sense of isolation and separateness. Only on occasion did realization of what happened in other colonies force upon a New Englander an awareness of how truly English he had remained.

How then did the colonies ever begin to acquire a common identity? To an overwhelming degree they developed similar features and beliefs, not by copying one another (for apart from interactions within specific regions they remained generally isolated from each other) but by imitating the mother country. The colonies had to grow consciously more English before they would ever recognize themselves as Americans. I call this process Anglicization, a word that carries some danger if used too loosely. That is, it can become a catch phrase through which things are joined together that ought to be kept analytically apart. Yet it does describe a process of real change that overtook all the colonies before the middle of the eighteenth century, even though it assumed quite distinct forms in different regions.

New England Anglicized at the core while remaining stubbornly unique (or American by seventeenth-century criteria) on the fringes. The staple colonies Anglicized on the fringes but retained their unique American core (quite different from New England’s) whose formative influence continued to expand in major new directions. The middle colonies present special problems. Anglicization occurred there too and generally along New England lines. But it was much more likely to follow ethnic and class demarcations.

The real social revolution engulfing the staple colonies after 1680 was the rise of a slave economy which became well entrenched by 1720. It, along with a balancing of the sex ratio and the opening of a vast French market for tobacco, finally brought social stability to the Chesapeake. Indeed at some point in the eighteenth century, Virginia displaced Massachusetts and Connecticut as the most stable society in the empire. South Carolina followed a similar path about a generation after Virginia. At their deepest social and economic roots, in other words, the staple colonies continued to diverge from English norms. Britain had no counterpart to the slave plantation, a fact that suggests the disturbing possibility that slavery rather than democracy may have been the most truly American creation of the colonial period. At the very least, it was something Europeans adopted overseas, not at home. From this perspective, Virginia was simply following, rather belatedly, a social pattern that had taken hold in most earlier staple colonies—Mediterranean islands in the fourteenth century, Portugal’s Atlantic islands in the fifteenth, Brazil in the late sixteenth, and the West Indies in the seventeenth.

By giving whites a new common interest against blacks, the growth of slavery muted class tensions that had frequently erupted in the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, the county court developed in the Chesapeake as a kind of participatory oligarchy. Great planters retained a tight monopoly on justiceships, but to lesser county offices they appointed a remarkably high percentage of the small planters, especially the voters, who thus became more deeply involved in local affairs.

In brief, both seventeenth-century New England and eighteenth-century Virginia achieved almost incredible stability, but their formulas were quite different. Where New England had combined family settlement, village cohesion, some vertical mobility, and ethnic homogeneity with intense religious conviction, Virginia finally did improve general life expectancy and spread family life downward through the social order, but blended both with the isolated plantation, a highly visible line separating great from small planters, an almost deliberate dilution of religious belief, and an ethnic diversity so extreme that it united one race against the other, through a master-slave relationship that kept blacks divided. Only in the eighteenth century did the Chesapeake elite tend strongly to become hereditary in particular families.

In the southern colonies, economic growth meant expansion rather than diversification. Institutional life did become more sophisticated, and, at a superficial level, it did seem to duplicate Old World patterns as merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergymen, and teachers began to appear. But their functions, even their existence, remained subordinate to the imperatives of a staple-crop economy. Just as planters imported finished goods from Britain in exchange for the crops they exported, so they imported professional services and personnel as well. South Carolina’s entire bar was trained at the English Inns of Court. Virginia was just starting to shake off its dependence on the Inns as independence approached. Of over three hundred Anglican clergy in Virginia between 1723 and 1776, only seventy-three had been born in the colony and only forty-five had attended William and Mary. The same pattern probably held for dissenting clergy (even Baptists), physicians, and tutors.

No matter how sincerely it may have been experienced by particular individuals, planter imitation of England remained a surface phenomenon—fringe Anglicization. To alter the perspective slightly, the tobacco and rice provinces remained preeminently colonial societies, hopelessly and continuously dependent on the outside world for goods and services that Old World communities provided for themselves. From this perspective, if the American Revolution was indeed the first outburst of anticolonialism in the modern world, it was conspicuously premature south of Pennsylvania, which, however, may be what colonial revolutions are all about.

New England also retained a visible dependence on Britain, especially for manufactured goods and credit. But the area was what we today might call a modernizing rather than a colonial society. That is, it had begun to create within itself a capacity to meet its own diversified needs. The pressure of population upon land began to stimulate new extremes of wealth and poverty, pushing toward European standards without ever reaching them. Family structure and even sexual behavior began to approximate Old World norms. New England built its own ships, its merchants traded increasingly on their own risk, and through its own colleges it met the local need for professional services.

But in terms of surface behavior—the kind of thing that might overwhelm a casual visitor—the region appeared to have changed much less than it really had. Ministers droned interminable jeremiads, the Puritan Sabbath inhibited amusement, election sermons remained important public occasions, and most settlers evidently still believed in the New England way, despite the nasty buffeting it took during the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Thus where Virginia’s House of Burgesses and South Carolina’s Commons House of Assembly minutely copied details of British parliamentary procedure, the Massachusetts General Court happily continued its bizarre customs which, among several oddities, gave personal seniority almost no weight in making committee assignments. Despite the persistence of such behavior, New Englanders did generally shed their extreme distrust of Great Britain, preferring to believe that the area was a kind of junior partner with Britain in a common enterprise. They often expressed this relationship in their own religious idiom including their millennial expectations which, incidentally, focused strongly on the empire, not on America.

Ethnic and religious pluralism somewhat altered this process in the middle colonies. Apart, perhaps, from the New York City Dutch, pressures for Anglicization tended to pit non-English ethnic groups against the Anglicizers. [W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? exclaimed Benjamin Franklin. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them? Within the Quaker community, Philadelphia friends were more tempted by English ways than were country Quakers. In other words, Anglicizers were more likely to be a self-conscious minority throughout the middle colonies where weak educational institutions continued to reinforce dependence on the Old World until the 1750s. Similarly the churches of the region acquired self-sustaining powers only after mid-century. But as in New England, the economy was diversifying and modernizing.

These different varieties of Anglicization began to converge in the realm of politics, where they laid a basis for a common identity—first British, later American. After the upheavals of the seventeenth century, Britain discovered its own form of political stability by the 1720s, resting in essence upon the court’s ability to discipline factions through its control of a vast patronage network and its influence in elections. The same era saw the establishment, indeed the institutionalization, of a permanent minority opposition in Parliament that appealed to the political nation in the language of country ideology. It affirmed the liberty, virtue, and independence of the Commons against the encroachments and corruption of the court. Although the opposition could almost never deprive the ministry of its parliamentary majority, its rhetoric did dominate the London press. From there it passed across the ocean to the colonies.

Colonial practices increasingly imitated English ones as the settlers interpreted their own struggles in terms of a continuing tension between court and country—governor versus assembly, or power versus liberty. But once again, New England and the staple colonies borrowed somewhat different elements of a common tradition. In New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, stable government came to depend upon a powerful executive who used patronage to control the assembly. Those left out of the system, nearly always a minority before 1760, fought back in the language of English country ideology. Northern colonies, in other words, tended to replicate the totality of the English experience. But in Virginia and South Carolina, governor and assembly learned to cooperate voluntarily as conflicting economic interests became absorbed in the increasingly homogeneous world of the great planters. Each respected the other while retaining its traditional powers and independence. Because the system approximated the ideals of the English opposition, country ideology merged as a consensual position in the colonies—a device not for opposing the governor but for idealizing the status quo.

The colonists by 1760 inhabited a world that offered them three targets of political loyalty: their province; the continent, or America; and the empire. Province and empire outweighed America in every respect. Loyalty to either mobilized a cluster of expectations about revered, traditional institutions—expectations that had been sorting themselves out in the century or more since the founding. As of 1760, colonists experienced two levels—and the loyalties each evoked—as mutually reinforcing. Loyalty to province strengthened loyalty to empire, and vice versa. In other words, intense attachment to place, to a particular colony, did not lead inevitably to American nationalism and the Revolution, even though some scholars do make this assumption. In fact, practically every settler who loved his province enough to write a history about it in the years after 1750 emerged as a Loyalist, not a Patriot, in 1776.

Compared with loyalty to province or empire, a sense of an American identity was unfocused, vague, weak. American loyalties had nothing specific to attach themselves to, and certain intercolonial events did not significantly alter this situation before 1760. The Great Awakening did leap over colonial boundaries, but it made little impression south of Pennsylvania until the 1760s except in the Virginia backcountry. By the time it took hold in the staple colonies, it had largely burned itself out elsewhere. Yet the small wave of college founding that it stimulated did involve visible intercolonial—and imperial—efforts. More important were the French wars, which may have brought over ten thousand New England and New Jersey soldiers into New York, over a thousand Virginians into Pennsylvania, and hundreds of North Carolinians into Virginia. Military service must have broadened provincial attitudes, but it may at the same time have intensified some intercolonial tensions, especially in rent-riot areas of New York and in the upper Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania. The wars did create stronger bonds of mutual dependence among the merchant communities of Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia. The cities were also beginning to develop a common style of radical politics, but this phenomenon apparently had no significant intercolonial component before the 1760s.

The very idea of an American as against a Massachusetts or Virginia loyalty occurred more readily to Englishmen than to the settlers themselves. From their distant perspective the British were, in part, merely homogenizing provincial differences that few of them understood. But the French wars, especially after 1755, did make them treat America as a unit of policy to an extent never attempted before. In the process Britain rekindled her sputtering fears that one day the colonies would unite against her, and to an extent difficult to measure, this concern influenced postwar policy. Although London’s new measures always involved other and initially more powerful interests and motives, Britain did find herself trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy. She accomplished what she most wanted to prevent. In this sense, America was originally Britain’s idea. Only with great reluctance did the colonies finally accept it for themselves.

For our purposes, colonial resistance became revolution by 1775 because British policy had managed to polarize for most settlers what had once seemed harmonious: loyalty to province and loyalty to empire. Why this happened remains debatable; that it happened is not. Ideology, clearly an essential element to the story, is nevertheless an insufficient explanation. In the Stamp Act pamphlets, the dread of power became a central theme only after modes of redress were closed. Corruption remained a peripheral issue and was applied mostly to the stamp masters, not Crown and Parliament. In other words, colonial attitudes did harden into an unyielding country mentality in the decade after 1765, but this uniformity was as much a product of colonial resistance as its cause. Moreover, Loyalists viewed the world in much the same terms.

Hard interests were at stake as well as beliefs. Tobacco planters felt grossly exploited by the old colonial system and fiercely resented the suggestion that they had not carried a fair share of the imperial burden. On this question the magic of Americanization has mesmerized even the sophisticated disciples of the new economic history who have taken great pains to compute the cost of empire in per capita terms for all Americans in the 1760s. As their own statistics show, Americans did not pay for the system. Tobacco and rice planters did—perhaps 70 percent of the whole. Thus while the benefits of empire were spread fairly evenly, its burdens fell most heavily upon tobacco planters in particular, a group already worried about it precarious profit margin.

But the argument from economic interests also has its limits. It works best for the planters, who did use the Revolution to liquidate the mercantilist economics that they resented, but it does not easily account for the high incidence of loyalism among northern merchants. In fact, as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pointed out long ago, independence implied a choice of disasters for most merchants—either way. If they sided with the British, they faced confiscation from the patriots. If they embraced the Revolution, they would very likely be plundered by the Royal Navy. In a world organized solely by merchants, the Revolution could never have happened.

This article offers no final answers to these difficulties, only a few suggestions relevant to the origins of American national identity. The prerevolutionary crisis was fundamentally one of integration or centralization. Issues became so inflamed not because Britain and the colonies had been drifting apart for a century or more but because economics, politics, ideology, and London’s administrative machinery had been drawing the empire closer together at an accelerating pace throughout the century. The Currency Act was so troublesome, after all, because by 1760 the separate colonial economies had linked themselves much more tightly with Britain’s. They were more vulnerable than ever before to such dislocations as the credit contractions of 1762 and 1772. Most important of all, perhaps, this process of integration had not occurred the way London thought it should. That is, it did not adhere very closely to the expected norms of colonial behavior that had crystallized around the Board of Trade in the 1690s and that received new emphasis in imperial administrative circles after 1748. Many difficulties of the 1760s arose from Britain’s attempt to apply outdated solutions to problems that were themselves anachronistic.

Without quite realizing what it was doing, London applied to the colonies an intensity of pressure that the ministry would not have dared to impose at home against the will of the community. Colonial recognition of this discrepancy is, at bottom, what the settlers meant when they demanded the rights of Englishmen. The colonies did not rebel because they were inherently less stable than Britain. Some were. A few were not. New Hampshire, Virginia, and lowland South Carolina were considerably less turbulent than Britain by the 1760s, a decade of extremely fragile ministries for the home islands. One difference deserves more attention than it has received. British politicians instinctively appreciated the boundaries to their effective power at home, no matter how genuinely they reverenced parliamentary sovereignty. Their sense of restraint did not characterize imperial relations from the time that Charles Townshend took charge. Beginning in 1767 Parliament never relented in its determination to force or trick the colonies into acknowledging its sovereignty. As the colonists recognized that their interests might indefinitely be sacrificed to Britain’s, they expressed their anxiety in strident political terms. For legally the colonists had no place to hide from an angry Parliament and no