How Britain lost America

Representatives of seven of the American colonies met at the Congress of Albany in June 1754. The aim of the conference was to bring these starkly different and disunited colonial entities into a joint defence pact against French aggression, in what would become known in America as the French and Indian War and in Britain as the Seven Years War. One attendee, Benjamin Franklin, captured the urgency in his ‘Join, or Die’ cartoon, of a snake chopped into sections, with each one given the initials of the various colonies. Franklin, Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts and Thomas Pownall, a well-connected Englishman visiting from Britain, drafted a plan with the aim of creating a Grand Council to coordinate policy on defence, trade and ‘Indian Affairs’. The Council, meeting annually, would be served by a ‘general government’ and work with a President General: an ironic title only in retrospect. There was no intention to distance the colonies from Great Britain; the President General would be appointed in London. The plan was at one with Franklin’s view of ‘the Colonies as so many Counties gained to Great Britain’ that, forged by a commonality of interest, would provide the foundation for a Great British empire of North America. His vision was not widely shared by those at Albany, who were more concerned with back-room double dealing for the benefit of their colonies alone. The plan was nevertheless put to the colonial assemblies, who rejected it; but then so did the government in London.

 By 1763, the French were no longer a threat. Under the premiership of the Duke of Newcastle and the direction of William Pitt the Elder, Britain had defeated France in both the East and West Indies and had not only protected its American colonies but seized Canada. Great Britain was now the world’s greatest power, but it had come at a cost, political as well as financial.

The 22-year-old George III had succeeded his elderly and all-too-Germanic grandfather, George II in 1760. He deliberately highlighted the difference between him and his father: ‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.’ Young George, encouraged by his tutor, John Stuart, Earl of Bute, took a keen interest in government and Bute himself soon became the cuckoo in the nest of the Pitt-Newcastle administration. In their turn, the other two members of the unhappy triumvirate resigned, leaving Bute to end the Seven Years War and to negotiate the peace. The 1763 Treaty of Paris was a fair one, but the Scottish earl faced opponents both inside and outside Parliament. Viewed as an interloper and denounced for allegedly selling the country short, he was broken by the verbal hostility of his peers and the assaults of an anti-Scottish mob, which bombarded his coach with rocks and excrement. Bute’s resignation, on April 9th, 1763, did not mark the end of political instability; it intensified it. It would be another seven years before Britain had a government that enjoyed the support of both Crown and Parliament. During that interval, the relations between the British government and its more rebellious American colonists deteriorated. These two developments were inextricably linked.

Stamp Act

Bute’s successor as prime minister, George Grenville, won parliamentary support for the introduction of a Stamp Act in America as a means of repaying at least some of the debt accumulated during the Seven Years War. The resulting tax on stamped paper was far reaching, affecting much more than legal documents and commercial transactions, extending to newspapers and even playing cards. It was a tax on everyday life, though less burdensome than its equivalent in England. It produced something remarkable: coordinated opposition from the colonial assemblies, as well as violent reprisals against the collectors. The opposition was not based on the amount of the tax but on its nature: it was an ‘internal tax’, something that the American assemblies regarded as a long-standing part of their remit. It was resented more for its political than its financial aspects, as was explained to the House of Commons in February 1766 by Benjamin Franklin, who had come to Britain as a representative of the Assembly of Pennsylvania in 1757 and would stay in London, with one short interlude, until March 1775. 

In response, a bill to replace the Stamp Act was introduced, not by Grenville (who had alienated the king) but by the Marquess of Rockingham, Newcastle’s successor as leader of the ‘Old Whigs’ and now prime minister. Rockingham’s supporters knew that the repeal could only succeed if it was accompanied by legislation asserting parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies: the government’s majority depended upon it. The result was a fudge. Through the Declaratory Act, Parliament asserted its supremacy over the colonial assemblies and declared its right to pass legislation for the American colonies; but it was accompanied by an informal assurance to the colonial representatives in London that it was a right that would never be exercised. Franklin was satisfied, declaring to the Commons that ‘you claim the same right with regard to Ireland, but you never exercise it’.  He was to be proved wrong a little more than a year later. 

The Declaratory Act was not enough to sustain Rockingham in office and, in the summer of 1766, the king persuaded Pitt to return. Pitt, it was believed, offered stability. He was generally sympathetic to the Americans and had the authority of a successful and respected war leader, leading Franklin’s friend William Strahan to write at the time that: ‘Mr Pitt, it is agreed on all sides, is the only man that can at present extricate us from our present and more immediate difficulties.’ But Pitt, elevated to the Lords as the Earl of Chatham, showed himself unable to act as prime minister and, debilitated as he was by physical and mental illness, incapable of functioning  in any meaningful way at all.

Townshend's duties

This lack of leadership offered an opportunity to Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a long-time advocate of enforcing parliamentary supremacy over the colonies. Ignoring the views of his Cabinet colleagues, Townshend persuaded Parliament to pass the duties on the American importation of glass, paint, paper and tea which bear his name. Once again there was resistance in America, all the more bitter because the powers of the Declaratory Act had been exercised. The opposition was particularly acute in Massachusetts and, the following year, the secretary of state, Lord Hillsborough, ordered British troops – supposedly stationed in America for frontier duty – to garrison Boston. It was a move supported by Parliament. Edmund Burke summed up the position: ‘The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them: we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us … we know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat … Some party must give way.’  

Townshend died suddenly in 1767, but his successor, the Duke of Grafton, could only retain a parliamentary majority by bringing a core of anti-American ministers into his Cabinet. When Lord North replaced Grafton in 1770 he retained the same balance of ministers and his position was cemented by the support of the king. Political stability had been achieved, but with a coercive policy towards America locked in place. War between Britain and its American colonies did not break out until 1775, but the breakdown of trust between the two sides had begun a decade before. The success of the Seven Years War, its exceptional cost and a British political leadership in flux had unbalanced the relationship between Britain and America. The formerly disunited colonies had come together in response to perceived British aggression. Though it was the colonies that rebelled, the first moves had been made in London.     

George Goodwin is the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).