The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776

744 Pages·1968·15.365 MB·English

by  Merrill Jensen

The Founding of a Nation
A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION 1763-1776
Merrill Jensen
NEW YORK OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON TORONTO
1968
Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 68-29720
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I have incurred a host of debts that mere words can
only acknowledge, never repay. The obligations to the men of the Revolu
tion who left diaries, letters, newspapers, and other documents for posterity
to ponder over are obvious. So too are the obligations to the historians
who have been writing about the American Revolution ever since it
began. With some of them I have agreed, with others I have disagreed,
but always I have learned from them.
The debt to librarians is beyond measuring. The staffs of such libraries
as the Public Record Office in London, the Library of Congress in Wash
ington, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York Public
Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical
Society have been invariably helpful. One library, perhaps more than any
other, has a call upon my gratitude: the Huntington Library. Some years
ago, Dr. John E. Pomfret, the director, now retired, provided me with a
fellowship, the facilities, and the ideal scholarly atmosphere which made
it possible for me to get the writing of this book under way. I also owe very
particular thanks to the staff of the library of the State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, whose patience has been beyond compare.
Quotations from the Adams Papers are from the microfilm edition, by
permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Over the years the people who have at one time or another been mem·
bers of my research seminar at the University of Wisconsin have taught
me as much as I was ever able to teach them. In the course of weekly
battles with words, wits, and facts there developed a community of schol
ars for whom I have great respect and to whom my gratitude i~ very great
v
Vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
indeed. Citations to their research in the footnotes of this book give
some small indication of their contributions. In addition certain former
students have read and criticized portions of the manuscript. My thanks
go therefore to Jackson Turner Main of the University of New York at
Stony Brook; James Ferguson, Queens College, New York; Carl Ubbelohde,
Case-\Vestern Reserve University; and Joseph Ernst, York University,
Toronto. My colleague, Norman Risjord, also read a large portion of the
manuscript and offered many helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to
William Abbott of the University of Virginia and Charles Mullett of the
University of Missouri, who read the manuscript at the publisher's re
quest.
For assistance in research I am deeply grateful to the Research Com
mittee of the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, and also, since
1964, to the Trustees of the Estate of Senator William F. Vilas, and partic
ularly for providing money for graduate students to work with me as
research assistants. Among the former research assistants whose help has
been indispensable are Roger Champagne of Northern Illinois University;
Peter Barry, Wisconsin State University, Whitewater; Rupert Charles
Loucks, University of Hartford; Stephen Patterson, University of New
Brunswick; and Kenneth Bowling, University of Wisconsin. I owe a very
particular debt to the two research assistants who have helped me see
this hook through its final stages: John Shaeffer of San Fernando Valley
State College, and Robert Becker, a graduate student at the University
of Wisconsin. Without their unflagging energy, meticulous attention to
detail, and forthright criticisms of ideas and style (some of which I ignored
as being too conservative), this book would have taken far longer than it
has to complete.
Last, but by no means least, my gratitude and my admiration are due
to Virginia Fiedler and Ellen Story who typed and re-typed page after
page of the manuscript with meticulous care; and to my wife, Genevieve
Jensen, who has read and re-read page proof and found errors missed by
all others.
It should be needless to say so but the responsibility for everything be
tween the two covers of this book is entirely mine, and I acknowledge it
gladly.
Merrill Jen sen
Madison, Wisconsin
June icj58
Symbols and a Note on Sources
Frequently cited sources with long titles, newspapers, the names of manu
script depositories, and the like, have been assigned symbols. The symbols
are given in square brackets immediately after the title in the first full cita
tion. A table of symbols, with the chapters and the numbers of notes in
which the first full citations are given, appears on pages 705-7.
In quoting from eighteenth-century sources, spelling and capitalization
have usually been modernized and abbreviations have been spelled out.
Punctuation has been added or deleted when necessary to clarify meaning.
Contents
INTRODUCTION xi
PART ONE: THE FIRST CRISIS 3
America in I 763 7
II British Politics, Policies, and America, 1763-1765 36
III The Economics and Politics of American Protest, 1763-1764 70
IV The Revolt Against the Stamp Act 98
V The Nullification of the Stamp Act 126
VI The First British Retreat: Repeal of the Stamp Act and
Commercial Reform 155
PART TWO: THE WIDENING RIFT 183
VII The Aftermath of the Stamp Act in America 186
VIII The Aftermath of the Stamp Act in Britian:
The Townshend Program 21 5
IX The Constitutional Protest Against the Townshend Program 2 39
X Politicians, Merchants, Customs Officers, and Non-importation in
the North, 1767-1769 265
XI The British Army, Boston, Parliament, and Non-importation in
the South 288
XII The Second British Retreat, 176cj--1770 314
XIII The Climax of American Resistance, l 769-1 770 334
XIV The Collapse of American Resistance, 1770 354
PART THREE: THE FINAL BREAK 373
XV Various Roads to Crisis: America South and West of
New England 377
ix
X CONTENTS
XVI The Revival of Popular Power in New England 403
XVII From India to Boston Harbor: Tea, Tea Parties, and
the Intolerable Acts 434
XVIII The Beginnings of American Union: The Creation of
the First Continental Congress 46i
XIX The First Continental Congress 483
XX The Road to Concord Bridge: The Way of Politics 508
XXI The Road to Concord Bridge.: The Way of Force 535
XXII The Beginnings of a Civil War 568
XXIII Revolution vs. Reconciliation: The American Dilemma 6o2
XXIV The Dream of Reconciliation and the Drive for Independence,
1775-1776 632
XXV The Founding of a Nation: "The Unanimous Declaration of
the Thirteen United States of America" 667
Table of Symbols 705
Index 709
Introduction
After independence had been won many Americans looked back and
sought to explain the history they had helped to make. Among those who
did so were Dr. Benjamin Rush and John Adams. In i787 Rush wrote
that "there is nothing more common than to confound the terms of
American Revolution with those of the late American war. The American
war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American revolu
tion. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is
closed." A quarter of a century later John Adams made the same distinc
tion. "What do we mean by the Revolution? The War?" he asked Thomas
Jefferson. He answered his own question by declaring that the war "was no
part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it." And
to another friend he wrote that "a history of the first war of the United
States is a very different thing from an history of the American Revolu
tion."
While Rush and Adams agreed that the American Revolution and the
war for independence were two quite separate events, they differecl in their
interpretation of the nature of the American Revolution. Rush looked
upon it as a continuing process. "We have changed our forms of govern
ment," he said in 1 786, "but it remains yet to effect a revolution of our
principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms
of government we have adopted." On the other hand John Adams
believed that the Revolution took place before i 776. He told Thomas
Jefferson that his idea might be "peculiar, perhaps singular," but asserted
that "the Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected,
from i 7fu....1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was
xi
xii INTRODUCTION
shed at Lexington." A bit later he wrote to another correspondent that
"the revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people and in the
union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities
commenced." Adams looked upon the accomplishment as something
of a miracle, for the colonies were so different in so many ways that to
unite them "was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.
Thirteen clocks were made to strike together-a perfection of mechanism
which no artist had ever before effected." To understand how it was done,
he insisted repeatedly, "the records of the British government and the
records of all the thirteen colonies and the pamphlets, newspapers, and
handbills of both parties must be examined and the essence extracted
before a correct history can be written of the American Revolution."
What "essence" can be extracted from such records? Historians have
interpreted the origins of the war for independence in various ways. They
have found its "cause" or "causes" in political and constitutional issues,
in economic difficulties, in religious concerns, in intellectual forces, and
the like. However, all too often the concern with "causes" leads historians
to fasten upon a single explanation to the exclusion of others equally
relevant, or to adopt abstractions that oversimplify complex events. No
one understood this better than John Adams when he declared that "the
principles of the American Revolution may be said to have been as various
as the thirteen states that went through it, and in some sense almost as
diversified as the individuals who acted in it. In some few principles, or
perhaps in one single principle, they all united."
The primary concern of this book is not with a search for the "causes" or
the "principles" of the war for independence; its purpose is to set forth as
fully as possible the complex history of a period of time which ended when
Americans declared their independence and proclaimed the foundation of
a new nation which they named the United States of America. This book is
a political history, and while political and constitutional theories, economic
conditions, and social and religious tensions are a part of the story, the
emphasis is on the deeds of men rather than on their motives and their
rhetoric, on the actions of men on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean which
ended in the most important political decision in American history-the
decision to separate from the British Empire after more than a century and
a half as a part of it.
To a certain extent, therefore, this book is an account of the extraordi
nary group of men who rose to power and led thirteen of Britain's New
World colonies to declare their independence. It is also an account of
INTRODUCTION xiii
other powerful American leaders who opposed independence but who, in
the end, were forced to choose between loyalty to Britain and citizenship
in a new nation.
And since the men who led the new nation after i 7'J6 had their roots in
and rose to power within their home colonies, this book is necessarily a
history of thirteen separate colonies, although not all colonies have been
treated equally, and some have been virtually ignored. It is a history
further complicated by the fact that, while there was opposition to
British policies in all the colonies, Americans disagreed about the means,
the methods, and the ends of that opposition. Beyond this, several of the
colonies were divided into "factions" or "parties" on domestic issues,
and as American leaders jockeyed for popular support and political power,
the question of opposition to Britain was sometimes subordinated to or
even lost sight of in the course of local political battles.
The history of the period is therefore one of extraordinary intricacy. It
is not the history of a united American people marching inexorably along
the road to independence and the creation of a new nation. It is instead
a history of a divided people, many of whom, if they had been free to
choose, would have remained within the British Empire rather than risk
their lives and fortunes in a struggle for independence and citizenship in
a new nation.
Finally, this book is based on the assumption that both Benjamin Rush
and John Adams were right in their interpretations of the American Revo
lution although it is limited to the revolution described by the latter. The
"principles" of that revolution were indeed "various" and it is to setting
forth a portion of that great variety that the following pages are devoted.