The Rest Is History - 347: The American Revolution (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

“America, late the strength, now the foe to Britain, dismembered, torn, I fear forever lost to England, whence she sprung.” The American Revolution came about due to growing tensions between the American colonies and Great Britain, primarily over issues of taxation and representation. It led to the birth of the United States of America, established upon Enlightenment principles of liberal democracy and constitutionalism. In the first episode of our four part series, Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Adam Smith for a detailed look at the beginnings of the American Revolution, as they examine the background to the war, and how both religious fervour and the implementation of colonial taxes fuelled the conflict.  The Rest Is History Club members can listen to the full series now. Join The Rest Is History Club on Apple podcasts or at www.restishistorypod.com for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows, and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name, your cafe name, Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home.

Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. The page of future history will tell how Britain planted, nourished, and for two centuries preserved a second British Empire. How strengthened by her sons, she rose to such a pitch of power that this little island proved too mighty for the greatest efforts of the greatest nations. Within the space of 20 years, the world beheld her arms triumphant in every quarter of the globe.

Her fleet displayed victorious banners, her sails were spread, and conquest graced the canvas. Historic truth must likewise relate. Within the same little space of time, her Britain fell to half her greatness. How strangely lost, by misjudging ministers, by rash advised councils, our gracious sovereign George III saw more than half his empire crumble beneath his scepter. America, late the strength, now the foe to Britain, dismembered, torn, I fear forever lost to England, whence she sprung. So Tom, that was the Duke of Manchester in November 1775 in a House of Lords debate about using foreign troops in the colonies in the American War of Independence. So this is, for us in Britain, the funny thing about this is we don't

really know much about this at all, do we? it looms so large in the consciousness of americans but it's not taught in britain it doesn't really have any great purchase on our national imagination it's weird isn't it how um in britain we don't really know very much about wars that we lose no but we that's for the funny thing is i knew you were going to say that but i thought to myself myself, we actually love defeats. So Gordon, Khartoum. Yes, but they're heroic. Heroic defeats. Right, exactly. And heroic defeats in which ultimately we prevail.

Maybe, maybe, maybe you're right. So, you know, and the Duke of Manchester's comment there. Yeah. That I fear forever lost to England. I mean, he wasn't wrong. Very tragic. Yes. So the American Revolution, an enormous um uh one in which many of our

listeners will have strong opinions i think it's fair to say tom certainly those who live in america although the funny as we said the funny thing is that our british listeners probably won't have strong opinions because they don't really know anything about it and we're going to cover it in the next two weeks in a mighty epic and we have recruited a mighty expert have we not we have um and uh this expert like ourselves is uh british yeah so i'm sure all our american listeners will be thrilled to get the perspective from the mother country it's important that the podcast is not polluted by any bias which is why we didn't have an American. And Tom, we welcome back to the podcast Professor Adam Smith, who is the Edward Osborne Professor of History at Oxford. That's right, isn't it, Adam? And director of the Rothermere American Institute.

That's right, Dom. Yes, it's good to be back. So, Adam, a massive subject, a tragic subject, some might say. And maybe we should start, since this is such a black hole in the British imagination, by giving a picture of the colonies. So we are in, well, we're not quite yet in the 1770s, are we? Because we're going to do the sort of, we need to paint a picture before we really get stuck in. So we did a podcast a few weeks ago with Malcolm Gaskell about witches in New England, and that was in the late 17th century. But a century on, where are we? What do the colonies look like? They look very prosperous, very confident, very populous.

The Royal Navy calculated that the population of the colonies were two inches taller than the population of England. And that tells you a lot, doesn't it, in the 1750s and 1760s. About one and a half million people lived in the colonies, the 13 colonies that were to go on to rebel. And they were used to self-government in practice. And this is obviously really important in terms of the story that we're going to tell. They had different kinds of charters. Some were royal colonies, some were established in different ways. But in one way or another, they all had forms of representative government. And because property was much more easily accessible, they all had property qualifications, a property franchise, just as was the case in Great Britain. But in practice, this meant that a much wider number of

people could vote and participate in government. In New England, they had this very strongly entrenched tradition of town meetings. And so there was this really active participation in the formulation of policy and the running of local affairs. And so London seemed a very long way away. In another sense, London seemed closer perhaps than the other colonies. It was much easier to get from Boston to London than it was from Boston to Charlestown in South Carolina. There was a post road from Boston to New York, but it was a trial to get from Boston to Philadelphia. So there wasn't much intercolonial interaction. But nevertheless,

they were separate from the mother country in terms of practical governance. That didn't mean they felt separate, though. They were patriotic Englishmen and they said that repeatedly right up until the the breach in 1776. So Adam what what is the British kind of governmental presence in the new world? Well it's very slight Tom but the the the seven years war which I know you've also done a podcast about haven't you so I don't know whether we want to get into that now. But the Seven Years' War really changed the dynamic because then there was a British military presence. There was a distant London supervision of the colonies.

There was a Secretary of State for America. And there was a complex system of navigation laws, the McCantillist system, which attempted to restrict colonial trade, although it wasn't very good at doing so. It was an incredibly leaky system. So there was a broad framework of law within the context of Britain and the allegiance to the British royal family, which Englishmen on the other side of the Atlantic always felt. But the Seven Years' War was the moment when presence was felt on the ground, I think. And so the Seven Years' War in America is generally known as the French and Indian War. Is that right? That's right, yes. And that kind of sums up what the stakes are for Britain and for the 13 colonies in North America,

because they are faced with two foes. They're faced with the French, which have a massive imperial presence in Canada and kind of reaching into the center of North America. And of course, they have the Indians, as they were called, the Native Americans, who are also very, very kind of sizable confederations at this point. And yet the British emerge victorious from that war. The French are basically expelled from the New World. And the corollary of that is that there is a huge military presence now in America. And that presumably is something that hadn't been the case prior to the Seven Years' War. Exactly. This is really, this whole story over all these

episodes of doing the American Revolution is really a story about the French. It's a story about British relations with Europe in one sense. And, you know, you ask about British presence in America. If you're a British administrator in Whitehall, thinking about your colonies in the middle of the 18th century, you're not really worried about what's going to happen in the port cities in Boston and Philadelphia before the 1860s. What you're worried about, as you say, Tom, is the French presence in the interior and the question of the balance of power in Europe and how the European presence in North America might affect that. Is it not also the case, Adam, that when people talk about the colonies, they're really talking about, I mean, if you were to say to somebody in 1740,

I'm going out to the colonies, I'm very worried about the colonies. You're talking about Barbados, Jamaica. The incredibly lucrative islands of the Caribbean rather than, are they backwaters? Is that too strong to describe the colonies? It's too strong because in population terms, they were so much more populous. But that's absolutely right.

There were 26 British colonies in the New World in the middle of the 18th century. Only half of them rebelled in what we call the American Revolution. And we'll get onto this later. But in one sense, the American War of Independence was not by any means a complete disaster for the British because what they managed to stave off was the much more worrying prospect of losing the Sugar Islands, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, which they avoided, not without having to fight naval battles

against the French and the Spanish. So Adam, an amazing stat that the mainland North America's largest crop is tobacco, and that sells for an average of £750,000 a year. But the sugar cane and the molasses and the rum and everything from the West Indies is fetching an annual average of nearly £4 million. Right. So that gives a really impressive sense of what's at stake. But again, just to go back to the strategic situation in North America with the French and the Native Americans, there's a key expedition, isn't there, in 1755 led by General Braddock, who is striking out to try and capture a French fort, Duquesne, in what's now Pittsburgh. And this ends disastrously. Braddock ends up dead. It's one of the great military defeats in British history. But the thing that's intriguing about it is the involvement of two people from the North American colonies, one of them a young officer called George Washington, who is very keen to get a commission with the British Army and kind of serves as an aide-de-camp to General Braddock. And the other one is a man in Philadelphia called Benjamin Franklin, who furnishes, I think, 150 wagons.

And both of those, you know, these young men at that time are very, very patriotic, very, very pro-British. Yes. And in both cases, and especially in Washington's case, also very keen on the acquisition of land in the Ohio Valley. And that's what's driving a lot of this. What is the concern about potential French alliances with Native American tribes and the constantly shifting relations with indigenous people. It's that there is this constant sense that there is huge wealth out there inland in the Ohio Valley. And George Washington is personally really invested in that. He's a surveyor as well as a officer um he although he's from a very wealthy virginia family and he marries the richest widow in virginia he still ends up as 18th century

gentlemen often did hugely indebted and and and wants and wants more land so he like like hundreds and thousands of other american colonists has a have a very personal financial investment in white European expansion beyond the Appalachians. And that's key to this story. That issue about the pressure for land, the colonists pushing in land, even before the Seven Years' War, is there a sense that the British, the metropole, as it were, that they're trying to restrain them from doing that? Is there a sort of tension there? Or does that not come in until the end of the Seven Years' War? I don't think the metropole before the Seven Years' War really has the capacity to try to do that, Dominic, but they become extremely conscious of it in the context of the Seven

Years' War, because that's when they have to spend, the British government has to spend an extraordinary amount of money in dealing with the consequences of the fight over land in the West. But Adam, isn't one of the kind of the paradoxical consequences of the Seven Years' War that it actually generates incredible tensions between British subjects of the crown in America and those in Britain, because the British government and the American colonials draw entirely separate conclusions. The British government's conclusion is that it's absolutely essential for the stability of the British Empire in North America, that Native Americans be kept on board, that they stay happy to be in alliance with Britain. Whereas Americans like George Washington think the lesson is we should go for

this, we should cross the Appalachians. We should settle these very, very rich lands that lie beyond. And there's a kind of inherent conflict of interests there that will get more and more polarizing as the years and then the decades go past. Yes, that's exactly right, Tom. And the proclamation line of 1763 is the British government's efforts, at least temporarily. I mean, they later pushed the line further westwards, I mean, before the American Revolution. But it's their attempt to say this far and no further. And they also know that the only way to police that line is to retain british regular troops in north america and that then becomes the source of conflict as well because they need to be paid for yeah so i'm just looking at the

stats so 1763 which is when the proclamation is made so 1763 is also it's the final year of the seven years war i think i'm right in saying yeah it's also the year of Pontiac's Rebellion. Yeah. So that's an Indian, I mean, uprising is perhaps not the right word because it implies sort of formal subordination. But there's a guy called Pontiac leads a group of Native Americans. They go into Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. They kill 2,000 people. Is that the one where they're playing a lacrosse match? And they chuck a ball into a fort and then pretend to go and get the ball back and

then massacre everyone is that right my knowledge of lacrosse is very sketchy it's a top sports related massacre right but i'm just looking at the figures so britain's debt at that point 1763 is 137 million pounds and the inch so that's the war debt and the interest alone on that debt is five million pounds a year and before the war britain's annual peacetime budget had been eight million pounds a year so presumably that issue of oh the colonists are going to keep pushing keep pushing keep pushing and we need troops either to stop them from doing so or to deal with the inevitable ructions among the native Americans when they do do it, that must be absolute for British governments in a very small state world.

Yeah. That's intolerable, presumably, the idea of spending all that money just and throwing money away. It's a complete crisis. I mean, the Seven Years' War is... The British victory in the Seven Years' War is a glorious and incredible victory. And it's much celebrated across England. And, of course, it's a war fought all around the world, not just in North America. But it brings with it the problems of peace are immense. And the financial burdens are where it really hits.

The difficulties of maintaining – of course, we haven't even got into the question of Quebec as well, and the Catholic French population in Quebec, which has now become part of the British Empire. And the question of how the British government tries to bring those people into the British Empire as well is also part of the story. So the poor administrators in Whitehall having to deal with this problem, and the new government that comes in after the end of the Seven Years' War has a huge set of difficulties. And they're not looking at this, of course, from the perspective of the 13 colonies. I mean, they don't know what's going to happen over the next 20 years.

None of them have ever been there. Americans visit. You know, Ben Franklin's always coming over and, you know, giving his, dispensing his wisdom. But, you know, they're trying to run this huge, complex world empire with a very shaky tax base. The British people are hugely taxed, the most taxed in Europe. There's all kinds of strains in trying to run this empire. And the last thing they need are continual trouble from their white colonists in the 13 colonies, who they think, well, they've got everything they want anyway. They're very undertaxed.

They've got lots of cheap land. What do they need more in the Ohio River Valley for? And that's and that's an entirely understandable set of assumptions i think viewed from whitehall in 1763 what people in whitehall and indeed in london so we were just you know you were joking about benjamin franklin's folksy wisdom um is i i was under the impression he was is he not talking about test tubes and things like that i mean is that not his is science? Tom, is he something to do with science? Lightning, yeah, lightning conductors. He's talking about lightning rods.

I know that people enjoy that. But what do people generally think when they think about Americans? I think they do think of them as different when they encounter them. I mean, the New Englanders at least sounded different. I mean, they had Yankee accents. There are phonetic reports of the way that Americans spoke, which clearly British people found deeply amusing. And obviously, there'd been many, many generations. I mean, you know, there's 150 years between the first

settlement of these colonies and the time we're talking about. So these are long established places that have grown in ways that are quite different from the metropole. So somebody like George Washington, Adam. George Washington, of course, doesn't even have his own teeth. George Washington, his accent, what would he have sounded like if he was talking to us now? Why does anybody from HBO or whoever it is think that George Washington sounds like that? I mean, I love the idea that he did. He had wooden teeth, of course, as well, wouldn wouldn't he which would no doubt also have impeded it so if um people in america are

i mean their accents are kind of recognizable yes as kind of being british to many people in britain how are people in britain viewing americans are they seeing them as basically british people or as perhaps as as um as relics from the 17th century, kind of people who are from the past of Britain, but kind of living fossils, if you like. I think that's right. But that actually points to something important in what you just said there, Tom, which is I'm not sure really that people in Britain would have seen Americans

in the 13 colonies all in the same way. So I think they would have seen the southern planters, the South Carolinians and the Virginians, and perhaps in much the same way as they saw the planters of the Caribbean. Whereas the New Englanders, they just would have seen as, you know, the descendants of the Cromwellian, humorless Puritan types, and would have seen them in quite a different light. Because I mean mean it's a it's crucial isn't it to understanding what's happening in the colonies that they're actually very different religious dispensations as well so you've got um you've got the kind of the the

puritan presbyterian establishment in new england and you've got the quakers in philadelphia the city of brotherly love yes and um it's kind of much more Anglican tinge to other colonies. Yeah. With established churches in Virginia, there was an Anglican Church of England establishment, a quite different religious feel. And the colonists themselves were constantly talking about this. I mean, George Washington had never been to New England before he went to Boston to take command of the Continental Army. I mean, why would he have done? He'd been to New England before he went to Boston to take command of the Continental Army. I mean, why would he have done? He'd been to the Caribbean, which sort of makes this point about the similar interests and values of the southern planters

and the Sugar Islands. But he saw these New Englanders as just this kind of weird, dirty rabble with this strange religion and very alien to him. But one thing we haven't yet talked about, Adam, which is massive, surely, is the Great Awakening. So that sweeps across the colonies in the early part of the 18th, sort of early to mid-18th century, this sort of evangelical enthusiasm, people having these meetings and talking about God.

And that surely has a massive impact on life in the colonies, doesn't it? It does. And it takes place in Great Britain as well. And with many of the same preachers, George Whitefield being the most famous who sailed to the Americas in 1739, having been turned to evangelical religion while he was at Pembroke College, Oxford, something that's happened to several people since then. Hey, we know someone like that, Adam, don't we? We do. He was a member of something when he was at Oxford, he was a member of something called the Holy Club. Anyway, he went to, George Whitefield was an extraordinary public speaker.

In fact, Benjamin Franklin, who, as you say, Dominic, was a scientist, did all these experiments when he went to listen to George Whitefield. He wasn't really interested in what George Whitefield was saying, but he was interested in how George Whitefield projected his voice and how far he could project and how many people. So he did all these calculations about how many people could hear George Whitefield at a single moment. But as you say, the colonies were swept by this religious fervor, not evenly and certainly more in New England than elsewhere. And historians over the years have tried to connect, not wholly and plausibly, the Great Awakening with the coming of the American Revolution on the grounds that evangelicalism is about the individual, it's about distrust of formal authority, about a direct relationship

with God, about taking control of your own life. Would the American Revolution have happened without the Great Awakening? Probably, but it may well have looked a little bit different. Okay, well, things are clearly breaking down between Britain and the colonists. So I think we should take a break. And when we come back, find out what happens. But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are looking at the American War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, whatever you want to call it. And we have the great Adam Smith with us to talk us through these complex issues. Just following on from this idea that there are

different religious dispensations in the various colonies. I mean, doesn't that actually have implication as well for how the various colonists, the respective colonists, understand how government functions? Because the whole thing in New England, the kind of the Puritan idea is that you, you more kind of Anglican states in the south. Again, they would have a different understanding of how, of what it would mean to be, you know, what the ideal form of government should be. Yeah, that's definitely how I see it, Tom. It's not that the inhabitants of the 13 colonies didn't like self-government and independence. They did. The question was what that meant. Up until 1775, they believed they could have self-government and independence and the regulation of their own trade effectively and could tax themselves all within the British Empire. What made that in the end seem impossible to them were the actions of the British government. And so in 1763, everything we've been talking about here,

these attempts to raise revenue in the colonies, just in order to defray the costs of keeping a standing army essentially on the frontier and to crack down on the widespread smuggling that was happening, the avoidance of the Navigation Acts, the rules that regulated trade in the British Empire. This attempt just to professionalize and modernize the governance of the British Empire, which Prime Minister George Grenville started to try to do extremely sensibly from his point of view in 1763, that ended what had seemed to be this long period of benign neglect from London. And that's the change. That's where the action came from.

Those are the people making the moves in London. So Adam, I mean, I know a lot of our listeners will think this is very unfair, but could you reasonably say that actually what's happening here is a British government is finally grasping the nettle. They've allowed a very shambolic system to continue for decades with loads of smuggling, all this stuff. And finally, in a very enlightenment way, they're like, right, let's sort this out. Let's put on an even keel, proper defense for the colonies, proper organization, pay your taxes. You know, it's not anything tyrannical it's not anything new i know people will think this is unfair and taking the british side but that is kind of

reasonable way of putting it isn't it i'm sure there will be listeners who will think that's a very unfair way of putting it dominic but i think it's entirely reasonable um and and the the dimension here which you which you you haven mentioned, is the role of Parliament in Westminster, because I mentioned Prime Minister Grenville. It's the British government in London acting through Parliament. And of course, what everybody in Britain understands, but which it seems most people in the colonies don't fully understand, is the Glorious Revolution, which establishes, as you know, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, this amorphous but important idea of the king in parliament. And so it is all of these people we're talking about on the British side, and some of them become known as Tories, but all of them, broadly speaking, are Whiggish in the sense that they all support the settlement of 1689, of the Glorious Revolution.

And therefore, for them, the supremacy of Parliament is the non-negotiable thing. But there's a sense, isn't there, that actually the American colonists, by opposing this ideal of Parliament, one that's been a very hard one, are actually playing the part of royalists. I mean, there are people in England who call the the part of royalists. I mean, there are people who, in England, who call the American colonists royalists. Yes, well, I mean, rightly so. I mean, the colonists are Tories in the real sense of the word. I mean, they are directly, at various points up until 1775, they're directly petitioning the king to act unconstitutionally, to override parliament in the way that the

Stuart kings could have done, but George III was never prepared to do. Even though, of course, in the long run, the strategy of the American revolutionaries is to say that George III is actually the tyrant. It's a very... But that manoeuvre to focus on George III, Tom, is something that only happens at the very, very end. That's the maneuver of the Declaration of Independence and the short run up to it in 1776. petitioning him to listen to their grievances, despite the fact that George III is, because he's a Patriot King and believes in the settlement of the Glorious Revolution, is of course operating constitutionally through Parliament. And so he cannot do what the colonists want him to do. So just to hammer that point home, and when you read the Declaration of Independence,

indeed, when you go around these places in Boston and stuff, and it's all about the George III versus the colonists, that's actually not really what this is about. The key to it is the authority of parliament, which for British people is so important, the authority of parliament vis-a-vis the independence of the colonists. And that is the key battle, isn't it? It is the key.

For if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands and everything we possess or make use of, said the Boston merchants meeting in the 1760s. It's the basic principle that Parliament in London, which of course there are no members of Parliament sent across the Atlantic from the colonies, that they fundamentally reject the authority of Parliament. And up until the Seven Years' War and its immediate aftermath, while they may have theoretically also rejected the sovereignty of Parliament, in practical ways it had never really impinged

upon them. But it did now, and they really, really, really didn't like it. So to take the first of these landmark acts, which is the Sugar Act, April 1764. The extraordinary thing about this is that this, so this actually cuts the tax on imported molasses. But the deal breaker is that they beef up the collection of it. So basically, for the first time, the tax is more than nominal. It's actually going to be properly enforced. It's the enforcement of it. It's the regulations and the bureaucracy and all that business.

That is what inflames the colonists, isn't it? That's right. And they threaten to send New England merchants to be tried in a vice-admiralty court in Nova Scotia without a trial, which is the way that customs violations are always dealt with in Britain. There's nothing innovative about this from the point of view of the British government, but from the point of view of the people in New England, this violates their ancient rights as Englishmen to always be tried by a jury.

Even in a smuggling case, where as a long established precedent in England, if you're being tried for smuggling, what you don't want is a local jury to whom you've been supplying them the smuggled goods. So if you want to tackle smuggling, you have to have a proper vice-admiralty court without a jury. But to the New Englanders, this was outrageous because trial by jury was their basic right as Englishmen. And so they saw this as a deep violation of everything that they had come to assume was their rights and the way that they ran their own societies. Why mess with a system that was working was essentially the the colonial reaction

and are they completely i mean presumably at various points the british are saying to them well obviously we're doing this because we need all these troops we need to pay for all these troops to beat the french to keep you safe from the indians to allow you to expand to do all these things is there no sense of any kind of conversation at both sides just not listening to each other or what that's such a good question dominic and i i kind of feel reading the history of all of this over this you know 20 year period of crisis that there really isn't a conversation you know these are two sides that are talking past one another almost from the beginning and certainly by the end.

And I think that that's where the tragedy of this lies, I think. And the tragedy is that both sides basically are right. They are both right from their point of view. They're acting entirely reasonably from their point of view. I mean, overlaid on this becomes this sense of paranoia on both sides. But I think I think it's fair to say, especially on the American side, this increasing paranoia, which culminates in the Declaration of Independence with its series of really kind of paranoid, anxious denunciations of the king for things that the king clearly hadn't done in many cases. by 1776, Americans really believe all this stuff. They really believe they're being persecuted, that there is some plan to subjugate them, which then manifestly wasn't, but they genuinely believed it. So one of the answers to that is the introduction of the stamp tax, which is particularly notorious. And this is George Grenville again.

And so colonists have to purchase special paper for legal documents. And it's seen as a kind of imposition. So it particularly affects lawyers and journalists who have banned people to annoy. Terrible thing to do. But Stamp Act, Tom, has been imposed in england since 1694 so it's not some terrible innovation but and and so grenville when he is introducing it

is i mean he points out that people in america are being taxed about a tenth of what people in britain are being taxed and he he says the true way to relieve all is to make all contribute their proper share. So basically he's accusing the Americans of being freeloaders. Yes. Yes, that is. That is what he thinks. And there's a famous exchange in the House of Commons as well. Charles Townsend, he's later to come into the story

when he's Chancellor of the Exchequer, talks about these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they're grown to a degree of strength and opulence and protected by our arms, would grudge to contribute their might to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under and the thing about that quote i've just given you compared to yours tom is that there is a tone of arrogance yeah which when that was read in the colonial press did not go down well and in fact it was that that that speech from of townsends in the house of commons was responded to by one of the the small number of people in the house of of Commons who right from the beginning were strong supporters of the colonial position. So there was a chap called, one of the famous ones was Edmund Burke, who of course was Irish. Another one was Isaac Barré, who was also Irish. And this may not be coincidence.

Barré, I think he was from a Huguenot family. And Barré, who knew the colonies, you know, unlike most people sitting in the House of Commons, he'd been there and he'd fought in the French and Indian War. And he responded to Townsend in this famous sort of sarcastic speech, you know, they planted by your care? No, your oppressions planted them in America. They nourished up by your indulgence. They grew by your neglect of them. They protected by your arms. They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, Barré said to the House of Commons. And this speech was then reprinted. He probably didn't sound like a comedy Irishman, actually. He probably didn't sound like that at all.

But that speech was reprinted in the colonies. Later, when Edmund Burke gave his great speeches in defence of the colonists, they were all reprinted. I mean, Wilkes Bar in Pennsylvania is named after this guy. I mean, they loved these. I mean, naturally, you know, with these few people in the House of Commons who were saying what they wanted went down very well.

But, Adam, just to continue, I'm sure provocatively to our American listeners, sticking up for Grenville. If there's the risk that the British Parliament's position of principle shades into arrogance, is there not also the sense in which the principles of American colonists shade into hypocrisy. So I'm thinking of Richard Henry Lee, who from Virginia become one of the founding fathers, signatory to the Declaration of Independence and so on. And his protest against the Stamp Act is that he gets his slaves to stage a kind of a reenactment of various protests that

have been going on in the cities in Virginia against the Stamp Acts. And they parade effigies of Grenville, who is described as the infamous projector of American slavery. So this is being reenacted by slaves. And it then subsequently turns out that Lee himself had applied for the job of stamp distributor in Virginia. So there's all kinds of hypocrisies to be unpicked there.

But what about the paranoia, Adam, that you mentioned? I mean, I'm just, when the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act come in, so in the mid-1760s, the American economy is in a bit of a mess, isn't it? The end of the war. Yeah, and that's really important, isn't it? The underlying problem here is the tightening of credit after the war,

and it causes real economic distress. So that's obviously an element to the anxiety and the anguish and the sense that not only am I worse off than I was before, but the government's now interfering with me and getting me to fill in these forms and pay these new taxes. But the level of the paranoia, so the very famous speech by Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses in Virginia, when he's talking about George III as a new Caesar or a new Charles I, and this sort of sense of what we would now call a kind of culture war element to it, and a sense of incipient tyranny. And the sort of, where does that come from? Is

that to do with the religiosity of America? Is that because they're still trapped in a very 17th century King versus Parliament kind of mindset? I mean, why is it there? I mean, they've,'ve as you said they're two inches taller they've got all this space life is good why are they so why are they so stressed one answer is a sort of ideological one and there are two elements of that one is they're all great enlightenment thinkers and there's some basis to that you know some of them are reading locke some of them are reading montesquieu not very many of to that. Some of them are reading Locke. Some of them are reading Montesquieu. Not very many of them, obviously, but some of them are. John Adams certainly is. Thomas Jefferson is. The other reason, though, and I think perhaps a more important reason,

is the one that you just alluded to there, Dominic, which is the 17th century British Republican tradition. I think that's really where this come from, this deep St. Patrick Henry, who you just mentioned, of course, he's most, I mean, he was a great orator. Thomas Jefferson, who didn't like him, said he was a great orator, but Jefferson was a terrible speaker. But Patrick Henry's one of his most famous grades, of course, was give me liberty or give me death. And that deep of of the protection of individual rights and liberties which was as as englishman i mean this was this was there right from the from the 17th century english experience as you say and so adam one of the actually the kind of the main response in

america to these um impositions by from london is the state boycotts of British goods. And the really famous example of that is that they refused to import British clothing and the American women get out their spinning wheels and start making rough homespun and all that kind of thing. And that presumably is something in New England that would hark back to the idea of the Puritan hussif, godly housekeeper and so on. They're able to do that by drawing on those traditions.

Yes, I think Benjamin Franklin, when he's testifying to Parliament, says, and we don't eat lamb anymore. Because the little lambs are all growing fluffy in the field so we can use their fleeces to turn into wool. So take that, Parliament. Yes, and so this craze for homespun and people turning up to the Virginia House of Burgesses and not wearing proper wigs. That is shocking behaviour. And it's not a massive success in many ways, the non-importation movement, but it's really interesting because it's one of the first examples of an attempt to use consumer boycotts to affect political action. It's always leaky.

There are some very kind of performative gestures. You know, the students at Yale stop importing French wine. The students at Harvard don't drink tea. I mean, there's this kind of thing goes on. But what it's telling us, of course, is how far the protests against the Sugar Acts and the Stamp Acts that we're talking about seeped into colonial society and involved women, of course, who were the principal consumers in most households in charge of the household budget. But there are violent protests as well, aren't there?

So there's a famous incident on the 14th of August, 1765, when a mob attacks this guy, Andrew Oliver, who's the stamp distributor from Massachusetts. And after that point, I mean, they basically intimidate the stamp distributors. So there's a violence there. I mean, this is 11 years before the Declaration of Independence. And is that violence new or violence there. I mean, this is 11 years before the Declaration of Independence. And is that violence new? Or was that, I mean, obviously, this is the age of mobs in England and London. So is this just par for the course, just standard political kind of stuff?

In fairness, I think this is par for the course. I mean, if you want to make a political point, you gather a mob. I don't think there's anything that happens in the colonies, there's anything like on the scale of the gordon riots in in london a few years after the incident that you're talking about and you mobs which weren't regarded as unrestrained but were regarded as men of property and standing making a political point through force was was part of the english constitution and when they when they i mean you you're right about andrew oliver the other incident that happens around the same time is the mob goes to the house of Thomas Hutchison, who's I think the acting governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony at that time, and carefully dismantle his house. But I mean, carefully, you know, they put up ladders and they pull the tiles off the

roof and they take the paintings out and put them on a bonfire. But it's not just, they're not just firebombing it. I mean, it's a careful disassembly. And it does work, doesn't it, because the Stamp Act gets repealed? It worked brilliantly. It is impossible to implement the Stamp Act in the colonies, and Parliament repeals it. Unfortunately, perhaps from the point of view of dealing with this colonial rebellion, they at the same time pass a declaratory act saying, well, although we've repealed the Stamp Act, we nevertheless reserve the right to pass such a thing again.

We're not resiling from the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. And that's a bit of a poke to the Americans that was perhaps unnecessary. And the Townshend Act, so all the things regulating tea and molasses and all that, they are still in place? So the Townshend duties come in a little bit later. So that's in 1767 in a new ministry. So there's a renewed effort then in 1767 after a couple of quieter years because the same problems still exist. The same revenue challenges still face the British government in London.

So there's a new attempt then not to impose an internal tax like the stamp duties, which would have affected transactions in everyday life and newspapers and playing cards and all this kind of thing, but to tax imports and exports in a way that was felt to be much better established with much stronger precedent. But the towns and duties also then generated strong colonial resistance. So in the face of this kind of these increasing tensions, there's a request from customs agents in Boston for military assistance. And two army regiments arrive in Boston in early October 1768. And intriguingly, they are commanded by someone called William Dalrymple, who I gather is an ancestor of the William Dalrymple. Yes, he presents our sister podcast Empire. So there he is upholding the British Empire.

And it all basically kicks off. So, Adam, Massachusetts. What is it specifically, by the way, before we get into the so-called Boston Massacre? What is it specifically about Boston and about Massachusetts that makes it so incendiary? Because in Britain, everybody basically from this point on would start saying, listen, the colonies are absolutely fine. It's just that Boston is full of a load of nutters. And if we can just shut down Boston, then we'll probably be able to shut all this whole business down.

So is there something specific either to Boston or to Massachusetts or indeed to New England? Well, part of it is because of the economic downturn after the war and that Boston merchants are really feeling the pinch and that they are heavily involved in smuggling imported goods without paying the duties that they're supposed to be paying. So Boston is more particularly affected than other port cities. But it's also perhaps to do with the political culture of Massachusetts and a very, very strongly ingrained sense of self-governance and a very articulate political leadership and a press that is quick and articulate and a tradition of mobs in Boston as well, taking to the streets to make political points. And all of those things together probably push Boston to the fore. But the British perspective that this is only a Boston and

Massachusetts problem is, of course, wrong and is gradually proven to be wrong. It's incredible how long it takes people in London to realise that. I mean, even into the war, one of the key military strategies is this attempt to isolate Boston in the hope that that will subdue the rebellion and it doesn't work. So there are troops pouring in. I mean, these troops, as Tom said, these two regiments that have actually been transferred from Ireland, I think, the William Doubt-Rimple's regiments, they've arrived in Boston in the autumn of 17 1768 and anybody who's ever written about or read about a phenomenon where you have troops stationed in a city where they are effectively

alien knows at some point there is going to be a flashpoint and actually in a way it's surprising it takes so long so it's not until the beginning of 1770 now, no doubt like me, you have been to the Boston Freedom Trail. I have. And you've seen the terrible, you know, the very moving commemorations of the Boston Massacre, this scar in the history of our species, when the British were conceived to have behaved absolutely disgracefully. And yet, when I read about what actually happened in the so-called Boston Massacre, it seems like our brave boys were a little bit hard done by.

Do you want to tell the listeners the true story? Well, there were a small number of British troops who ended up confronting several hundred local inhabitants of the town. There'd been various small episodes that had led up to this in the preceding days and words had been bandied around and clearly the relations between the Redcoats, the regular troops and townspeople had not been great, not least because the British troops were underpaid and were needing to find jobs here and there.

And so they were actually kind of dependent on the townspeople in some ways and didn't like that dependent relationship. It was creating constant friction. And stones were chucked. And the accounts always say snowballs were chucked, which never really sounds that bad. They really were chucking snowballs.

Bricks inside. So I noticed that the American accounts very heavily emphasized the snowballs and the British accounts very heavily emphasized stones and cudgels. Yes. Oyster shells, don't they? Yes. Oyster shells. I think the roads were paved with oyster shells. So they were a very easily available missile to grab up.

But as you say, Dominic, this is a story that we've seen many, many times. In fact, it happens multiple times in American cities well into the 21st century that whenever you get armed forces confronting unarmed protesters, stuff happens. And what happens here was that five bostonians were shot by british troops the british account is that the that they small number of troops massively outnumbered were um forced against literally forced against a wall and and had to shoot in self-defense um that was the british. And the American account is the opposite, right? So Paul Revere, is it Paul Revere who's the silversmith who does this famous, famous engraving?

Engraving, yes. Of kind of a line of soldiers mercilessly shooting into these women and children or whatever they are. But the intriguing detail is that actually, and this is omitted from Paul Revere's illustration of it, is that the leader of the Bostonian freedom fighters or mob or whatever you want to call them is a towering dock worker called Crispus Attucks

who is half black, half Native American. And so he gets omitted from the narrative. Yeah. An interesting aftermath of the trial is that John Adams, who we've already mentioned in this discussion, a leader of colonial resistance, who's a lawyer, defends the British soldiers in court. And he does so in order to make the point that we in Boston are not lawless mobs. We do things by due process. And even in

Boston, in this moment in 1770, British soldiers can get a fair trial. And one of his key lines of defence, Tom, is that he defends the soldiers by saying they were facing a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And he puts a lot of the blame specifically on Crispus Attucks, a formerly enslaved man by saying his very look was enough to terrify any person so effectively Adams is

saying look face with that lot and especially that guy you know who can blame the British troops for panicking and so what happens how do they get off yeah they do get off Tom yeah don't they Adam yeah two of them manslaughter and they get off? Yeah, they do get off, Tom. Don't they, Adam? Yeah. Two of them manslaughter and they get branded on their thumbs and the rest are not guilty. Yeah. That's right. Yes, they get branded on their thumbs. Yes.

So at that point, so we're 1770, that's still six years before the Declaration of Independence. At that point, are we already in a spiral that is going to lead to outright conflict and American independence? Or, you know, is there, I mean, as we said, there's mob violence all the time. There are lots of dust-ups and things on the streets of London. Actually, could this have just been a footnote in history if things in the next six years had gone differently, Adam? I think the second.

I don't think that American independence was unstoppable in 1770. I think this could have been a footnote. I think there are an awful lot. We'd have to imagine, and we can talk about this in future episodes, we'd have to do an awful lot of intellectual work to imagine some quite significantly different things would have to have happened between 1770 and 1776. But I don't think there was anything inevitable about American independence at this

point, not least in the minds of the colonial protesters. I mean, if you just said to John Adams in 1770, are you on the road to independence? He would have been appalled. And the same of Washington and Franklin, do you think? Yeah, I mean, Washington at this point was just pursuing his own. I mean, Washington really wasn't engaged in this fight at all up until very late in the game. It wasn't really until 1775 when he became a member of the Continental Congress that Washington, we don't really know what Washington was thinking. Presumably he had broad sympathy with the, I mean, we do kind of know because he wrote letters and things. But I mean, he certainly wasn't the leader of the rebellion at this point.

But no, these people, the colonists at this point were fighting for their rights as Englishmen still. And it may well be for the reasons that we've been talking about in this episode, that they were doing so on the basis of such a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature, the actual nature of the British constitution, that they were never going to get their way. But at this point, what they wanted was to have independence of a practical kind of self-governance within the British empire, maintaining their allegiance to the king, who they continued to revere. This episode, of course, in Boston took place on King Street. Yeah. So what might have been? And I think on that note, we will end our kind of curtain raiser, our scene setter. And in the next episode, we will be looking at the road to open war

to the Declaration of Independence and so on. That's right. That episode is on Thursday, Tom. It is on Thursday. Yes. The Tea Party, the Boston Tea Party. What a shocking moment. The battles of Lexington and Concord, on that's right that episode is on thursday tom it is on thursday yes the tea party the boston tea party what a shocking moment the battles of lexington and concord bunker hill heard around the world all that exactly george iii proclaiming american rebellion and the road to the full-scale

war now of course that will be on thursday if you're a member of the rest is history club tom what's the good news if you're a member of the Restless History Club? Well, the good news is that the commercial spirit of the British Empire in the 18th century carries on into the 21st. And you can sign up for the Restless History Club and hear not just the next episode, but the next three episodes all in one spectacular game. And if you're American, I know what's on your mind. It is tax free. There is no stamp. There is no, there is no stamp. There is no toll to pay.

It's remarkably good value. And that should make you reflect upon your conduct. That bombshell Adam, we'll welcome you back on Thursday for the next episode. Thank you so much as always. And we'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. next time bye-bye bye-bye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets