The Loss of the American Colonies

In the eighteenth century the thirteen American colonies were the most important part of the British Empire. By 1775 they contained perhaps 2.5 million people, almost a third of the English-speaking population in the world, and they produced the tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, and naval stores on which much of the Atlantic economy depended. The British victory in the Seven Years’ War had just confirmed British dominance of North America. Within eight years the empire had lost almost all of it, and Britain had been driven to recognise the independence of the United States by the Treaty of Paris of 1783. The American Revolution was the most traumatic event in the history of the British Empire before the twentieth century, and the meaning of it has been argued about ever since.

The Causes of the Revolution

The American Revolution had many causes. The British government’s attempts to tax the colonies to pay for the Seven Years’ War, beginning with the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, produced widespread colonial resistance, articulated in the slogan “no taxation without representation.” The Townshend Acts of 1767, which imposed duties on glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea imported into the colonies, intensified the controversy. The Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770 — in which British soldiers fired on a crowd, killing five — became a symbol of British tyranny in the colonial propaganda of the following years.

The ideological background was equally important. The colonial elites were steeped in the English tradition of liberty, and they drew on the writings of John Locke and the radical Whigs of the early eighteenth century — Trenchard, Gordon, Molesworth — to articulate a theory of resistance to unconstitutional authority. The Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768, drafted by Samuel Adams and passed by the Massachusetts assembly, called for colonial solidarity in opposition to the Townshend Acts. The Virginia Resolves of 1765, drafted by Patrick Henry, asserted that the colonists were entitled to all the liberties of Englishmen. These were not novel claims; they were the inherited commonplaces of the English radical tradition, applied to a colonial situation in which the centre of the empire appeared to be acting unconstitutionally.

The Road to Independence

The decade before the Declaration of Independence saw a series of crises between Britain and the colonies. The Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, in which colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbour, produced the Coercive Acts of 1774, which the colonists called the “Intolerable Acts.” These included the closing of Boston harbour, the quartering of troops in private homes, and the suspension of the Massachusetts charter. The Quebec Act of the same year, which extended the boundaries of Quebec to include the Ohio country and granted legal toleration to Catholics in the province, was widely seen in the thirteen colonies as a further provocation.

The First Continental Congress met in September–October 1774 at Philadelphia to coordinate the colonial response. The Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The Congress assumed the functions of a national government, raising an army under the command of George Washington, issuing currency, and negotiating with foreign powers. The war was already a year old by the time Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776.

The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and revised by the Continental Congress, was the formal statement of the American colonies’ intention to separate from Britain. Its central argument was that governments were instituted to secure the unalienable rights of the people, and that a government which systematically violated those rights could be abolished and replaced. The Declaration listed a long series of grievances against George III — the imposition of taxes without consent, the suspension of representative assemblies, the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime — and it concluded with the affirmation that the united colonies “are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

The Declaration was, as Carl Becker memorably put it, “a compilation of the philosophic commonplaces of its time.” The political philosophy of John Locke, the constitutional arguments of the radical Whigs, the language of the English Civil War — all of these contributed to a document that was, in its own right, one of the founding texts of the modern world. It would later be invoked by revolutionaries in France, in Latin America, in Haiti, and elsewhere. The British government rejected its premises, and the war continued for another seven years.

The War

The American Revolutionary War was fought in North America, the Caribbean, and at sea. The British initially had significant advantages in military experience and naval power, and they controlled the major coastal cities. But they were hampered by logistical difficulties in operating 3,000 miles from their bases, by political disagreements in London, and by the entry of France (1778), Spain (1779), and the Netherlands (1780) into the war on the American side.

The British won several important conventional engagements: the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the capture of Philadelphia in September 1777, the Battle of Charleston in May 1780. But they were unable to deliver a decisive blow against the Continental Army, which was preserved by Washington’s careful generalship and by the failure of British strategy to coordinate the efforts of its various armies. The decisive moment was the American victory at Yorktown in October 1781, in which a French naval blockade trapped a British army under Lord Cornwallis and forced its surrender. The 1783 Treaty of Paris recognised the independence of the United States and ended the war.

The Consequences

The loss of the American colonies had profound consequences for the British Empire. It forced British strategists to reconsider the imperial project, and it shifted attention to India, the Pacific, and later Africa. The British government, chastened by the experience of attempting to govern a large settler colony by force, became more sensitive to the cost of imperial wars and more willing to negotiate with colonial elites on terms that preserved imperial unity.

The loss of America also had important political consequences in Britain itself. The war was deeply unpopular, and the political crisis that followed contributed to the fall of the North ministry in March 1782 and the brief ascendancy of Lord Rockingham and then William Pitt the Younger. The reform of the East India Company, the beginning of the campaign for parliamentary reform, and the development of a more cautious and pragmatic imperial policy were all influenced by the American experience. The American Revolution thus marks an essential pivotal moment in the history of the British Empire.

The American Revolution also produced, in the loyalist tradition, a population of perhaps 60,000–80,000 refugees who fled to Britain, to Canada, and to the West Indies. The loyalist presence in Canada was particularly important: the Constitutional Act of 1791, which divided Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada and granted representative government to the two provinces, was in large part a response to the loyalist settlement of Ontario. The American Revolution, in this respect, was the foundation of British Canada as well as of the United States.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the American Revolution was for most of the twentieth century dominated by a debate between progressive and conservative interpretations. The progressive school, of which Carl Becker and J. F. Jameson were the founders and Bernard Bailyn the most distinguished representative, treated the Revolution as a serious political event whose causes were intellectual and constitutional. The conservative school, of which Robert Brown and the Imperial school of Charles Andrews were the representatives, treated the Revolution as a tragic mistake whose causes were misunderstandings and demagoguery. The more recent scholarship, of which Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, and Mary Beth Norton are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a much more nuanced picture: the Revolution was a serious political event, but it was also a class conflict within the colonial elite, a popular movement with democratic and in some cases radical content, and a violent civil war as well as a war between states. The “Atlantic history” turn of the last twenty years — represented by the work of Jack Greene, Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History (2005), and the writers collected in the Oxford History of the British Empire — has situated the Revolution in a transatlantic context in which the constitutional language of the eighteenth century was a common inheritance. The British perspective on the Revolution, as developed by Piers Macksey, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, and Eliga Gould, has produced a much richer picture of the war from the British side than the older Whig tradition allowed.

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