Ch. 1.1. The French and Indian War and New British Policies
Adapted from Yirush, pp. 209-20.
The French and Indian War (or the Seven Years’ War) (1756-63)
With the onset of war against the French in 1755, Lord Halifax, president of the Board of Trade from 1748 to 1761, put in place a military commander for all of the colonies and established two Indian superintendents. The latter reflected the concern in imperial circles that the depredations of colonial traders and land speculators would drive the Native Americans into the hands of the French. But even this limited form of centralization engendered resistance, as many colonies refused to contribute adequate funds to the war effort, comply with the Navigation Acts, or cede authority over Indian affairs to the new commissioners.
Partly as a result of the unwillingness of most of the colonies to contribute to the war effort, the first years of the conflict went badly for the English. But in 1757, William Pitt took control of the ministry and changed strategy, putting in place a funding system whereby the Crown offered subsidies to encourage the colonial assemblies to make voluntary contributions to the cost of the war. This policy proved successful, but it meant the ministry incurring debt that would become a source of tension in the empire in the 1760s. As a result of Pitt’s new strategy, the tide of war turned in 1758 and 1759, leading to the British conquest of Quebec and virtually all French territory in North America.
Despite an upsurge of British patriotism on both sides of the Atlantic following the defeat of the French, the aftermath of war revealed a fault line in the empire. On the colonial side, the experience of impressments, the conflicts over the quartering of British soldiers, the treatment of the colonial militias by British redcoats, and the restrictions on wartime trade all led to discontent with British rule. These concerns were compounded when the settlers learned that the British army would be staying in the colonies, and that there would be limitations on westward expansion. Given that they had fought alongside the British, many settlers had assumed that they would share equally in the fruits of victory. Their disappointment would prove explosive in the years ahead.
From London’s perspective, colonial behavior during the war only intensified the need to resume the prewar reforms. In particular, there was a widespread perception that colonial legislators had abused their privileges, failing to adequately contribute to the war effort with money or men, refusing to quarter troops, and continuing to disobey the acts of trade. There was also a concern that the rapacity and duplicity of colonial traders and land speculators were alienating the Indians from the “British interest.”
The war also removed the military threat posed by the French, while leaving a large number of royal troops in the colonies. British officials thus had “a freer hand” to act in defense of metropolitan interests in the years after 1763. To effect the necessary reforms, these officials called on Parliament to alter the constitutional structure of the empire.
Parliamentary Sovereignty vs Settlers’ Rights
In 1765, when William Blackstone, the most influential legal writer in the late eighteenth-century British world, published his Commentaries on the Laws of England, he held that Parliamentary sovereignty applied in full to Britain’s overseas colonies. He argued that the American colonies were conquests, and, as such, “the whole of their Constitution” was “liable to be… reformed by the… legislature in the mother country.”
Although Blackstone glorified the British constitution as the apotheosis of liberty, he was adamant that there could be no challenge to Parliament’s authority from the people. He conceded that Locke and “other theoretical writers” had made a “just” argument “in theory” that the people had a right to resist the legislature when it violated the trust reposed in it. But Blackstone argued that the English constitution could make no “provision for so desperate an event,” which “at once must destroy all law” and “compel men to build afresh upon a new foundation.”
Legal and political elites in eighteenth-century England believed so strongly in Parliament’s absolute sovereignty over all Britons for two main reasons. First, they were convinced that Parliament’s triumph over the Crown in the Glorious Revolution had ushered in an era of unprecedented liberty and prosperity for all Britons. Second, any challenge to Parliament’s sovereignty was seen as threatening to bring back the kind of instability that had led to decades of civil war and unrest in the seventeenth century, memories of which were still present for many in the educated classes. Given these interrelated concerns about sovereignty, liberty, and stability, any challenge to Parliament from subjects in the empire was likely to meet with a decidedly hostile response.
Changes After the Seven Years’ War (1756-63)
In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, exultant in the worldwide victory of British arms, the settlers in America did not foresee that Parliament, which they also venerated as the guarantor of English liberty, would challenge their autonomy. Indeed, apart from the Board of Trade’s attempts to revoke the New England charters via statute earlier in the century, they had not had to confront any parliamentary legislation that seriously affected their internal governance. However, that was to change in 1763, when the ratification of the Treaty of Paris gave Britain control of all of North America east of the Mississippi, including New France, the Spanish territories in Florida, and the vast lands of the Ohio Valley where the war had begun.
The need to govern and defend these new territories led a succession of parliamentary ministries to propose reforms whose unpopularity in the colonies was to tear the empire apart a little over a decade after its greatest military triumph. In late 1762, the king’s favorite, Lord Bute, decided to keep 10,000 troops in America after the war’s end, both to defend the empire against the French and to control the valuable lands beyond the Appalachians in the Ohio Valley, which were inhabited by Native Americans and coveted by the settlers.
After Bute fell in early 1763, a new ministry under Prime Minister George Grenville came to power (1763-65). His cabinet consisted of men with extensive experience in colonial governance, chief among them Lord Halifax, the new secretary of state for the Southern Department (1763-65), who in his time as president of the Board of Trade had been an ardent advocate of imperial reform. In the summer of 1763, Halifax, along with the Earl of Hillsborough, his successor at the Board, were hard at work on a plan to govern the newly acquired territories.
Their work was given a sense of urgency by news of an Indian uprising in the west. Dubbed Pontiac’s War (1763-65) after the Ottawa chief at the heart of the rebellion, it had been triggered by Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander in chief, who had decided to withhold customary gifts of shot and gunpowder from the Native Americans, and it soon reached the frontiers of the colonies with deadly results. The rebellion was also driven by the natives’ concern that following the defeat of the French, the British, desirous of the rich lands of the Ohio Valley, would not live up to their agreement (in the Treaty of Easton in 1758) to withdraw from the west after the war.
The Proclamation of 1763
The Grenville ministry’s response was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which proposed the establishment of new colonies in Quebec and East and West Florida, each with a royal governor and an elected assembly. But to restore peace to the empire’s frontiers, the rest of the newly acquired territory – from the Great Lakes to Florida, and from the Mississippi to the Appalachians – was to be reserved for the Native Americans. By the terms of the Proclamation, no colonial governments could grant these lands to settlers, and no Briton could settle on them. As well, all of the Indian trade would now be under the control of the two superintendents, for the north and south, respectively, and could take place only at locations approved by them.
In addition to organizing territory, Grenville sought to raise sufficient revenue to meet the costs of stationing the army in America as well as to cover the large debt incurred fighting the French. Many in the ministry felt that the colonies had benefited from the defeat of the French without paying their fair share to prosecute the war. As a result, in the fall of 1763, Grenville began to tighten up the collection of customs duties, sending the Royal Navy to police the coast, and requiring that all customs officials reside in the colonies to combat the endemic smuggling and bribery that had so reduced the Crown’s revenues in America.