The British Empire and the Causes of the American Revolution | Andrew O’Shaughnessy

before we get started with tonight's lecture the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati has a special presentation to make I'm pleased to invite Tom Gore and the current president of the state of Connecticut and Bryan her an the immediate past president to address you all guess what this is making the Connecticut society and me particularly are are so honored to be able to present this painting to to the Anderson house and the society we are so proud of our fabulous past president hate to say that you know some nice thing he was president he's a particular fondness for me at my very first Cincinnati meeting which was a standing committee meeting that I had no business going to because I'd been a member for 30 days and nobody talked to me glasses and see this guy was he came over and in no time we were discussing the values of bourbon Manhattan's and we've been we've been friends ever since had to love the guy and I think this is a wonderful privilege and we're so happy to be here thank you thank you Tom Thank You Bryan Thank You Diane I really don't have the words to express my gratitude let me just say that nothing we accomplished in the last three years could have been done by one person alone it took a committed United dedicated team of leaders members and professional staff to do what we did and so on behalf of that team I give you my heartfelt thanks for this appreciation and I also give you my pledge that I'm going to spend the rest of my days with the Cincinnati working with this administration in future administration's to perpetuate the memory of that vast event thank you [Applause] Thank You Connecticut I would now like to introduce our history Committee Chairman dr. Cordell Lee Bragg known by his friends as chip Thank You mr. president general good evening ladies and gentlemen since 1975 the Society of the Cincinnati has sponsored the annual George Rogers Clark lecture to recognize the scholarship of leading historians of the American Revolution some of our clark lectures have stood alone as important works of scholarship others have offered a very personal perspective on a lectures major published works and occasionally we are offered a glimpse of the historians craft in the form of a presentation based on a lectures ongoing research tonight we will hear another in this distinguished series presented by Professor Andrew Jackson of Shaughnessy dr. O'Shaughnessy has enjoyed a long and productive career in academics having received quite a number of prestigious Awards honors in research grants he was born in Cheshire England and received his PhD from the oriole College at Oxford University in 1988 along the way to his present position he taught at Eton College at SMU and served as chairman of the department of history at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh currently he is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson foundation the Saunders director of the Robert H Smith international center for the Jefferson studies at Monticello and professor of American history at the University of Virginia to list as many accomplishments would take entirely too long suffice it to say that he is the author or editor of three books to date the most recent of which is titled the men who lost America British leadership the Revolutionary War and the fate of empire published by the Yale University Press in 2013 for this work professor o Shaughnessy was awarded the coveted George Washington Book Prize in 2014 and I have it from a very reliable source that for those of you who speak Mandarin the men who lost America is now available in Chinese published by the University of Peking Press there may be no better better person qualified to speak to us on the subject of the British Empire and the causes of the American Revolution so without further delay please join me in welcoming dr. O'Shaughnessy to our podium I'd like to thank Scott Johnson who with whom I originally correspond it chip Bragg and the Society of the Cincinnati for the honor of giving the George Rogers Clark lecture it's a tremendous honor when I look at the roster of previous speakers I'd also like to commend this society for the work that it does in propagating knowledge of the American Revolution it does this by various means one is to sponsor lectures at universities I've given three lectures for the Society at VCU VMI and hampden-sydney but they sponsor many more just here in Virginia bill Longin has often been my host you also produce videos of historians Elisha Tucker has produced some of those and you also have a library that is a gem for research and in fact in 2000 when I did my first book the librarian contacted me and said had I used the library I was very impressed because normally you reach out to libraries rather than the other way and I would also say that it's good that you discuss whether bourbon Manhattan's are better because they're makes for better history so I've taken very seriously the objective of this talk which is to give an original talk and when I was thinking of this I was originally thinking of something that I'd done much earlier which would be a comparison of Ireland and the British West Indies shortly after I did my book an empire divided the American Revolution the British Caribbean which is really about why the other colonies in the Americas did not rebel another book came out by an Irish historian called Vince and morally and I actually got to read it in proof I got the proofs from Cambridge University Press in fact it was a manuscript they were thinking about publishing it and I was amazed by the similarities in his arguments and the similarities between Ireland and the British West Indies and explaining why they didn't join the American Revolution but also how they reacted even the chronology was very similar but as I thought about this talk this evening I decided to expand this and to think about the entire British an empire not only Ireland and the British West Indies but also India Bermuda while we now think of as Canada which was separate colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec places like Gibraltar and how did they react to the American Revolution and the reason I've chosen this as a topic is I think that by looking at the colonies that did not rebel by looking at those other colonies which greatly outnumbered the thirteen mainland colonies here in America it actually helps us to better understand the causes of the American Revolution so the talk this evening is divided into two parts firstly I'm going to look the way their Britain pursued very similar policies outside America in places like India Canada and Ireland we'll see that the kinds of policies they were pursuing in America were also pursued in these other colonies and I'll talk about why that's significant in terms of the justification for the American Revolution and the cows us belly the reasons for the war and then the second half of my talk I'm going to look at the reaction of these other colonies and why they didn't repeal and how this by looking at these colonies it can help us refine our understanding of the causes of the American Revolution we can actually use these to debate and prioritize the reasons different historians and needless to say there are different views as to what the cause of the American Revolution were but I'm hoping you'll leave the room this evening with a clearer view well let me first of all think about the policies being pursued by Britain in the 1760s and early 1770s I would say at the outset that I do think that this was a war that Britain provoked one of my favourite titles for any book on the revolution was reluctant revolutionaries I see the revolutionaries in the early stages as reluctant people who are pushed to taking a stance that essentially causes them to rise up in rebellion the problem is though understanding those policies and what it was that the British were trying to do and most historians have generally thought of these policies is incredibly disjointed and unsystematic there was seven there were seven different governments in Britain between 1763 and 1774 that alone would explain why these policies might seem to be incoherent my favourite example is the Tea Act in 1773 that Lord North the Prime Minister didn't even bother to tell the secretaries stay for America who was then the Earl of Dartmouth that this act that the tea ships were on the way to America which we know is going to be very significant which meant that the Earl of Dartmouth had never bothered even to inform the governors in America of the imminent rival of the tea ships in the harbors of Boston New York and Charleston and else where many of these acts were passed for very specific reasons the quartering act of 1764 was passed at the request of the British Army who'd had real problems quartering troops during the Seven Years War as they call it in Europe and the French and Indian War that they call it here in fact though there are some common themes to all of these policies even though they may see months Instamatic they were all having a very similar objective and I think it's important to observe that France and Spain were pursuing very similar policies in their colonies at the same time all of these policies were about reforming the system of administration they were all about trying to extract a revenue and find a source of money in the colonies I'll be talking later about the size of the British debt in this period but they essentially had to find a way to make the colonies pay Britain needed to have an empire on the cheap it really couldn't afford the costs of administering and defending the massive Empire especially as it had emerged after 1763 they were interested in regulating trade that they'd lost control of they also wanted to improve the defenses of their empire after the French and Indian War you have what you could really describe as an arm's build-up an arms race between Britain France and Spain the Spanish and French felt so humiliated by that war that they immediately started to rebuild their navies at a much larger size than the British they also started to fortify their colonies if you even at a place like Puerto Rico or Cuba some of their most the largest system of fortifications like those in Havana which of the largest really in the new world are being really built up during the 1760s and one of the major objectives of the British in the 1760s was to impose more central control because the big problem for the British was in some senses they'd already lost America somewhere like New England nearly all of the positions were elective especially in Connecticut and Massachusetts and so they were trying to do something that was retrospective something they should have done a century earlier and that they'd allowed to escalate out of control now I just want to give you a few examples of how they're doing very much the same thing and pursuing these new initiatives not only in America but elsewhere and I'm going to give three examples Ireland India and Canada Ireland in many ways was much more subject to British control in fact Ireland was the great fear of most Americans of what America might become there had been a declaratory act in Ireland essentially giving Parliament absolute authority over Ireland since 1720 and even earlier in Irish history something called pointings law in 1494 which has essentially forced their Parliament to have any agenda item first of all authorized by the British Privy Council so they could do nothing really without British oversight something that American patriots were terrified might one day appear in America in the late 1760s the British started to tighten this control they sent over a new governor called George Vikon Vikon Townsend and if that name sounds familiar it should because this was the brother of Charles Townsend who passed the notorious Townsend X which included the tax on tea and the older brother was made the Lieutenant Governor General of Ireland and he became the first resident governor in Ireland rather like Virginia the governor's had not been resident now suddenly the governor was resident so that didn't happen in Virginia until Lord Botetourt at the beginning of the 1770s not only did he become resident but one of his main interest was enlarging the size of the British Army in Ireland the were at any one time since the late 17th century 12,000 British troops in Ireland they represented a third of the British Army throughout peacetime Ireland had the biggest system of barracks anywhere in Europe Dublin had the largest system other than in Potsdam in Prussia and the army was there essentially to maintain control this was far more troops than had ever been sent across to America and Townsend had orders from the British government to increase that number to 15,000 with 3,000 troops all of them paid by the Irish parliament 3,000 additional troops who could be used by the British anywhere in the world but all at the expense of Ireland he eventually managed to get this pass through and to create a much more direct system of British government doing away with the local Irish elite who are known as The Undertaker's who traditionally controlled measures in the Irish parliament and with much more direct authority from Britain using British patronage in India you have a different situation India was run by a corporation and I don't know why there's never been a more successful book on India because it's a fascinating story it was run by the East India Company and this was the ultimate the ultimat multinational not only was a international company it had his own army and his own bureaucracy and it ran a country and this was a problem for Britain because the East India Company was increasingly in debt it increasingly was taking on more than it could really deal with the size the areas under its control got larger the cost of Defence of having its own Navy we're getting bigger and yet actually it was more difficult for Britain to interfere in the East India Company than in America or Arland because it was a private company with a private charter and many members of the company and stockholders were also members of parliament and the company divided down the lines of party politics so it was a dangerous thing to try to control any any kind of attempt by a government was accused by the opposition of attempting to grab the patronage of the company and using that to totally corrupt British politics which was indeed a genuine danger and yet in 1767 at the same time that Townsend was enlarging the army in Ireland the government had a national inquiry and it passed three bills to start to regulate the East India Company two years later in 1769 it successfully levied a tax on the company it ordered that the company pay four hundred thousand a year for the next five years to Britain it was successful in a way that it was never successful in in America but in 1772 there was an international credit crisis banks crashed and this time it was the opposition not the government led by another name that becomes famous in American history General John Burgoyne who insisted on an inquiry into the affairs of the East India Company it resulted in essentially a show trial of a former governor-general Lord Clive of India who eventually committed suicide at the end of this process and the following year in order to try an off stay the opposition in 1773 Lord North once again passed a series of laws now for the first time started to change the managing structure of the company and to intervene directly in the way that the company was run lucy Sutherland who was the great historian the East India Company described it as an assault and the final example I want to give is of Canada in 1774 you have the Quebec Act which actually looking back seems a very enlightened act because it was going to give French Catholics freedom of religion in Quebec and there are only there are only a hundred and ten english-speaking people in this or people who could have voted in Quebec against ten thousand French subjects so this seems very enlightened they also allowed French law and a kind of French system of government but of course a French system of government was government without assemblies and government without representation and in new england especially this was interpreted as an attempt to create an absolutist French Catholic army with which to come down and crush the mainland colonists and indeed it certainly did strengthen Britain's hand this was a form of much more direct government the reason that these three examples are significant is that for a long time and for much of the 20th century the idea that the Patriots had real constitutional issues and that they had legitimate constitutional issues with Britain was often dismissed by professional historians beginning first of all with the so-called Imperial school who were dominant in America from the 1930s and even earlier through the Second World War the Imperial school said these taxes were nothing they're very small the Tea Act and the Americans were paying about 150 for the text of English people this was really about people at home wanting to gain control as one historian put it it was the struggle for power at home or people wanting to gain economic independence the constitutional issues were not really that valid and even the latest school of historians were Bernard Bailyn and known as the Republican school who emphasized ideology even they imply that the Patriots were really reacting to conspiracy theories and they were buying into conspiracy theories but again there's a sense that they didn't have genuine constitutional objections and indeed there's good reason why they might think like this it's difficult to demonstrate that there was real tyranny in America in 1774 the British had really restrained from using their army the worst example of military intervention was in 1770 with the Boston Massacre and which as you know five people were killed but what is remarkable about that Massacre is those soldiers were then put on a civilian trial two of them were branded and sent back to Britain in fact the officer and most of them were then discredited so this is hardly an example if we define tyranny as an absolute misuse of power the disappearance the rule of law this would hardly be an example and yet by looking at the what the British are doing elsewhere outside America it's further proof that American complaints constitutional complaints were far from groundless and fact by looking at the context the Empire one sees that the way that Britain was governing its Empire was radically changing in the 1760s and 1770s Parliament was making very new claims of its authority which it had never made before it had never text America before and the reason that this was dangerous is that the boundaries had never been well defined there was no written Imperial Constitution it was unclear where British Authority ended and where local autonomy began and that was important because throughout the previous hundred years each colony had started to create its own constitution its own rights Britain was in fact a federal Empire and a federal system the British argued you cannot divide power but in reality they'd been dividing power for a hundred years and that all changes in the 1760s it was not a deliberate plan of tyranny but what you could say is Americans were rebelling against a very real latent potential for tyranny if they permitted taxes to be raised that would have essentially enabled the British Parliament to totally bypass the system of representation now the second part of this talk is really to think if all of these colonies was subject to the same policies or some very similar policies why didn't they all repeal suddenly many of the American patriots thought that they were fighting a cause for the whole world and certainly the entire english-speaking world and the rest of the British Empire they expected the other colonies to rise in their favor there have been lots of monographs on the different colonies but they've not been brought together in a single picture Canada is the most interesting because Canada was the place where Americans most expected support and indeed they made overtures to Canada through the committee correspondents in Boston the Massachusetts Congress offered Canada and specifically Quebec to join the American Revolution one of those invitations was written by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and of course it was the one part of the British Empire which the Americans actually invaded in 1775 but they never really found the support they essentially made the same error that the British made in America they assumed and the majority of population were on their side and indeed some were but the majority were either neutral or in fact loyal the one colony that really did support the American Revolution was Bermuda and that's partly because most of the Mutis trade had been with America though very much involved in ship King privateers and fishing there were families like the Sanjana family who dominated Bermuda but happened also to be a prominent Virginia family so the connections of blood and Bermuda was the only colony in 1775 to send delegates to the Continental Congress they weren't actually sitting members they went over as a kind of delegation and what they were trying to do was to persuade the the Continental Congress to regard them as neutrals in actual fact though they were far from neutral to show that secretly they were supportive of the American cause they sent gunpowder over captured from the British fortification there over to Boston and for most of the war they showed a clear preference for the American cause but the two colonies that are most interesting and which really bring me back to my original intention and what I was thinking about doing at first were Ireland and the British West Indies because these colonies were the ones that were most analogous to the American colonists they're similar because they have similar political structures they had a system of representation Ireland had a parliament that went back to the Middle Ages and although I said earlier that no Britain could intervene at any time the odd thing is that Britain claim the theoretical right to intervene in Irish parliamentary affairs but was actually very cautious about the way that it intervened in Irish political affairs and the West Indian islands all had assemblies just like the mainland colonies indeed what is interesting is that their assemblies had often been more vigorous and more radical than the mainland assemblers and also making more radical theoretical claims the Irish parliament as early as 1490 had said that the British Parliament had no right to interfere in this affairs the assembly Barbados in 1651 this is over and the these kinds of claims this kind of thinking doesn't emerge in America until the 1760s in 1651 the assembly Barbados said the Parliament of Britain has no right to legislate for its internal affairs in 1692 the Irish parliament said the British Parliament has no right to interfere with our money bills or to dictate in any way our system of Taxation one of the pamphleteers who really influenced the American patriots was an Irishman by the name of William Molineux who back in 1692 did a pamphlet called the case of Ireland in which he argued for the autonomy of Ireland within the British Empire those ideas were expanded by dr. Charles Lucas in the 1740s and also by Jonathan Swift who's perhaps better known to most of us for writing Gulliver's Travels now it was of course more impractical for the British West Indies or British Caribbean and Ireland to rebel the Caribbean colonies were the last in the Americas to rebel whether it was from the French Spanish or British Trinidad and Jamaica were the first colonists to get their independence that wasn't until 1962 Cuba was the last of all of the Spanish colonists and the Americans to gain its independence and in actual fact there are still European colonies in the Caribbean but they go to great lengths to avoid the term colony but essentially Martinique and Guadeloupe passed still parts of metropolitan France places like Montserrat the British Virgin Islands the Turks and Caicos Islands still belonged to Britain although it was difficult for them to repel what fascinated me was that they didn't even participate in the pamphlet war against Britain there was nothing to stop someone writing a pamphlet and saying the Stamp Act was wrong or the Townshend duties were wrong and yet they never participated in that it's their silence which I found curious even in Ireland and when I read Vincent Molly's book I realized there was real similarity there before 1774 these colonists had basically tried to stay out of the whole Imperial debate between Britain and America they'd stayed studiously avoided any discussion of Imperial constitutional issues and especially where the rights of Britain ended and America began they'd much preferred their own local issues that really had no significance outside of their colonies and they stayed out of the debate until 1774 and 1775 that was the point at which the Continental Congress met and it ends in April of 75 were Lexington Concord at that point they couldn't but take a stance and they do indeed try to intervene to avert the crisis these colonies had nothing to gain from a war between Britain and America in fact they had everything to lose it was going to adversely affect their economies and it was also going to adversely affect their security they would they knew it would explode into a war with Spain and France and it would make them much more vulnerable so they do try to intervene belatedly to persuade Britain to find a compromise with America the British Caribbean even hired while today we consider a professional lobbyist to make the case to Parliament not that Britain had no right but that it would not be in Britain's economic interests to pursue this war there after they were very divided but only a minority really supported the American cause and the word people like Sir Edward Noonan who actually put a statue in his house to George Washington and this is in Ireland and was very open in his support of Washington in Ulster the Presbyterians really showed support for the American cause they reprinted Tom pains common sense that been a huge migration of what often gets called here scots-irish but from Northern Ireland in the 1760s so had many kinsmen over here and showed a great deal of sympathy for the American Revolution and yet once fighting broke out and especially after the Declaration of Independence any kind of explicit support that the American Revolution started to disappear in fact you get petitions of loyalty coming out of a lot of these colonies Jamaica and 1775 send a petition clearly demonstrating its loyalty to Britain even though a year earlier it had sent a petition showing some support for America which had been commended by Congress and by the Assembly of Connecticut what the leaders and they called themselves Patriots incidentally in Ireland and in the British West Indies but what these people wanted was separation from the Empire but as much autonomy as possible within the Empire Ireland had two very great local Patriot leaders during this period Henry Grattan and Henry flood and you have similar people in the British West Indies like Charles Price in Jamaica and Sir John gay alene after whom one of the great rums is named Mount Gay that was his estate in Barbados they were outspoken but only to have as much local authority and local self-control they were made it very clear that they would not denying British parliamentary Authority they did not want independence from Britain and they view somewhat strengthens Britain sent over a peace offer to America in 1778 called the carlile peace Commission in which they guaranteed never to tax America and to repeal all the legislation passed since the French and Indian War and after that point Britain was really just fighting for token recognition and authority the point is though that those rights then went to the British West Indies those same guarantees were extended to the British West Indies an island used the war to gain great many rights Irish trade had been restricted in wool and linen all of those restrictions were removed at the same time as the carlile Peace Commission and at the end of the war in 1783 Britain passed the renunciation act in Ireland that essentially gave Ireland self-rule unfortunately the only people who could vote in the system were Protestant but that would have come the closest that was the closest there could have been a solution to the Irish population certainly hostility to the war really grew in 79 and 80 these places were beginning to to really suffer economically they were very worried about a French or Spanish invasion but that was not the same as supporting America indeed if you look at these places their position was very similar to the position of the Opposition in England they just didn't like the war and wanted Britain to come to a peace but they were not looking for separation so I finally want to end up with why they didn't go the way of America what distinguishes them and how does this help us explain or at least prioritize the causes of the American Revolution well what really distinguishes them is not their ideology or their political structure we've seen that that's very similar what really distinguish them indeed the emphasis that I gave in my book on the British West Indies was partly their economic relationship with Britain the British West Indies particularly relied on the British sugar market Britain then and to this day were the biggest per-capita sugar consumers anywhere in the world and you only have to go into a grocery shop and Britain look at the candy counter to have verification of that and the fact is that the British West Indies could not produce sugar and its related products and molasses and rum at a competitive price which is why New Englanders were smuggling their molasses from the French West Indies it cost 1/3 more for them to produce sugar and is partly to do with economies of scale senda Ming later Haiti produced more sugar than all of the British islands combined they needed therefore the mccandless system they needed the trait in navigation acts that kept foreign competition out and that guaranteed them the British market the Irish situation is more complicated because a lot of water island produce linen and wool was competing directly with English farmers and the British were trying to keep it out of their markets at the same time most of Ireland's exports were going and would continue to go to Britain that was their natural economic Ally but another and maybe even more important characteristic that they had in common is when I talk about attitudes I'm really talking about the elites of these colonies the people at the top and one of their great concerns was said they needed the British Empire and they needed the British Army because of the social composition of those colonies only a quarter of the population of Ireland were Protestant the other three quarters were Catholic and in the British West Indies it was even more extreme only ten percent of the population was white the other nine temps were enslaved and the elites of these countries literally used the term the enemies within they feared rebellion at any time and they were quite right to do so in the 1760s in Ireland you had white boy rebellions as they were known and hearts of Steel movement in the British West Indies places like San Vincente continually had rebellions between 1773 and 1770 in 1773 John Paul Jones got his early career there so did major ferguson who recreated the repeating rifle and died here in south carolina he served down in trinidad jamaica had a major rebellion in 1760 and again in 1776 and in fact at the end of the century Ireland had its ultimate rebellion the largest until he gained independence of 1698 largely it actually had he was led initially by Protestants but became much more red Nikolai's under the influence the French Revolution and the British West Indies didn't have they had more rebellions but they didn't have a major successful rebellion but Haiti did and that revolution could have happened in the British West Indies these colonists were also more colonial in character the ties with Britain were closer the elites in these colonists were often educated in Britain and one other similarity between Islands and West Indies is that the very elite were absentee they actually lived in England which was untrue of anywhere in America except Charleston South Carolina where about 30 families did have a member of the family constantly living in England George Washington when he visited Barbados also pointed to another very major difference that might help explain why they remain loyal he said there are no yeoman here won't today we might call middle class or middling class it's not not historical to do that because the social system was more hierarchical but there was a lack of middling people not only in the British West Indies but also in Ireland and finally although I would emphasize this the least but there are religious differences the elite in both Ireland and the British West Indies were Anglican Church of England who were taught to obey Authority you know not to resist now I wouldn't make much of that because we should remember Jefferson George Washington many especially the elite in the south were also anglican spoke what was lacking was the real tradition of dissent in the upper leadership the West Indian colonists had had Quakers they'd had Presbyterians but they weren't organized they had no organized religion southern and the Moravians down in the British West Indies not until after the American Revolution when these other religions would flourish and in Ireland the descenders as they would have been called at the time the Ulster Presbyterians were indeed the ones who showed most support for the American Revolution but once America allied with France a Catholic country that became much more muted so how does this help us understand the causes of the American Revolution well what it does do is to show that if you just look at ideology and the constitutional reasons for the American Revolution you can't really explain the American Revolution and also why Americans themselves split during the revolution it may be the leading reason for the American Revolution but what these other examples show is that the economic and social context is clearly very important there are four different books explaining the American Revolution in Virginia one of the greatest is by one of your former George Rogers Clark Speaker ed Morgan at Yale and he used slavery to explain Virginia's rebellion essentially they're the planters were terrified of slave rebellion and they're also because there were so many slaves a third of the population in Virginia it sensitized them to their own liberties and to their own rights that this was a reason for them to rebel now the only problem with that is that slavery is also given as the reason why the British West Indies stayed loyal because they wanted the British Army as a police force now it can work as a reason in both places but we'd certainly have to modify it we'd have to modify that argument to say that the percentage of slaves in a particular place is key Tim Breen th Breen is another of your former George Rogers Clark speaker he did a great book called tobacco culture that explained the revolution in Virginia as a result of the credit crisis in Virginia in 1770 feet 1772 which is good the problem is that there was also credit crisis a much worse one down in the British West Indies and they remain loyal so what these examples do is to highlight the problem of explaining the American Revolution in terms of one cause it reminds us to think that there are always multiple causes their context is all-important this is how you explain why some Americans stay loyal why some Americans think that there is not a conspiracy to overthrow their rights that there is not tyranny because some for example benefited economically from the British tie there's no doubt that the elite merchants who had special arrangements with Britain or leading figures in the Anglican Church tended to be loyalist and so the decisions and choices cannot be solely explained in terms of ideology and constitutional beliefs we also need to look at the material self-interest and other considerations and looking at these other places and the Empire helps to emphasize the effect thank you [Applause] are there any questions for professor Shaughnessy O'Shaughnessy yes sir Scott Johnson RV in the kitchen the dependents of the army in terms of policing the slave state in the Caribbean where the Caribbean colonies also very cognizant of the possible either use of or withdrawal of the British Navy in terms of making their decisions or their peers they were incredibly sensitive to the movement of troops and navy in fact one of the reasons they become very opposed to the war is that they feel that they're getting insufficient naval attention and there aren't just aren't enough troops by about 1779 there were less than 2,000 troops in the British Caribbean now they used to have a peacetime defense establishment of at least 1500 so here in wartime with the French and the Spanish about to invade they did just didn't have enough troops the naval support they thought was inadequate in actual fact the British were pouring more troops and more ships into the Caribbean than in than into North America and this is something I hadn't even fully realized when I did my earlier book on the Caribbean it wasn't until I started writing about General Henry Clinton during the second half of the American Revolutionary War who's complaining that you know 5,000 of his troops the very first order in his command was to send 5,000 troops down to Seleucia while he was expected to win this war with fewer troops and less naval support and this was a man who as father was an admiral whose uncle was an admiral and really understood that the moment there was a weaker British Navy at sea and a more powerful French the British Army was cut off and he foresaw Yorktown and was warning British ministers from the moment that he took office but the Islanders were very aware of this one of them of course who was not on the island during the war but had been in 1760s was Alexander Hamilton and I've always thought you could make a lot more and churn out did a great job of finding material about his birth but the mindset that when we've growing up on these islands and remember the British Navy when it was in full force was larger than any city in America I knew no Philadelphia was the largest and we scaled the population of Philadelphia down to about 30,000 on the eve of the American Revolution well that's about and there were more men and in the ships of Manhattan when henry knox and his wife looked out from number one broadway and said it was like a forest at sea and imagine though Hamilton in Nevis and that's New York imagine being on the little island of Nevis and watching the British Navy no wonder he understood British power and wanted to emulate the system of credit and banking that could enable a smaller country than France to put those kinds of forces at work were there any voices of counsel in the British opposition in Parliament or in the higher levels of government telling the British government to watch the British opposition parties were really magnificent if you read their speeches and very courageous and they spoke out very openly against this war I'm by far the most articulate of what all of them was Charles James Fox who really made his name and early career as an opponent of the American war if you go to Brooks's Club in London because apart from giving wonderful speeches he also gambled and drank a great deal as stated in their time tended to and there is a bet in the betting book between him and General John Burgoyne in 1777 in which Fox was betting that he returned home defeated before Christmas and Burgoyne was betting that he returned home victorious before Christmas Edmund Burke the father of conservatism was one of the speakers against the war in Parliament and also William Pitt both the elder and younger two of the greatest British politicians and speakers of all time in fact when the younger pic got up age 24 to speak in the House of Commons Edmund Burke said he's not just a chip off the old block he is the old block because his speech was so brilliant and of course he went on to become Britain's youngest prime minister Parliament received more petitions against this war than any other previous war in terms of anti-war petitions they were all largely in 1775 but towns that had never petitioned Parliament petitioned for the first time against the American War there were almost as many pro-government petitions but the government of course was soliciting these petitions most of the opposition petitions were their own initiative so it was not a popular war even though you could say that probably the main part of the population was supporting the government I didn't hear anything about yes well I ignored the Bahamas in my book and I should have explained why because the Bombers technically are not part of the British West Indies I remember once hearing the Bahamas Minister of Finance and he said well I didn't realize until I got to Britain that I was in the Caribbean you know they regard themselves as part of their own and the other reason I didn't include the Bahamas is that the economy was very different there they were very thinly settled before the American Revolution had been great center buccaneering of freebooting they did have an assembly but it almost makes no sense to talk about Bahamian opinion or where they stood on issues what is important about the Bahamas is that they become one of the main destinations for loyalists and it becomes largely an American loyalists population and it's very interesting because right at the end of the war and the Marines attempted to capture the Bahamas and actually took Freeport it's the first operation of the American marines in 76 but right at the end of the war Spain actually captured the Bahamas but then it was recaptured but not by the British but by American loyalists out of Charleston and it were really one of the few campaigns and certainly outside America where loyalists played a big role although there was a big campaign down in Central America an attempt basically to take Guatemala and Peru ultimately was a mad scheme as so many often who knows a real freebooting scheme but that was led by American loyalists as well you

Channel: American Revolution Institute

Views: 17,304

Keywords: Revolutionary War, American Revolution, American War of Independence, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Boston Massacre, British Empire, British Caribbean, Ireland, Canada, India, Nova Scotia, Quebec Act, Bermuda, Reluctant Revolutionaries, Lord North, Tea Act, Loyalists, British Parliament, East India Company

Id: 9KAUnViRSP0

Length: 60min 43sec (3643 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016