The glorious cause, p.4
The Glorious Cause, page 4
Parliament had begun early in the seventeenth century to pass “Local Acts,” which applied not to the whole kingdom as a Public General Act did, but to a designated locality. These Local Acts created the Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes—the Commissioners of Sewers, the Incorporated Guardians of the Poor, the Turnpike Trusts, and the Improvement Commissioners (charged with lighting, watching, paving, cleaning, and improving streets). At the time of the American Revolution, there were over a thousand such bodies; eventually their number would reach eighteen hundred, with responsibilities extending over a larger area and more people than all the Municipal Corporations taken together. These statutory authorities differed from all other types of local government agencies, parishes, counties, and boroughs, for each of them was created by a special act of Parliament to fulfill one function, prescribed by the establishing statute, in a designated place. Commissioners of Sewers built and maintained in hundreds of localities trenches and drains to carry off storm water; they also constructed drains and other works to reclaim marshes and to keep out the sea. The verdant Midlands of England were in a sense the creation of these bodies, which drained off the water and kept it out, turning marshland into lovely and productive fields and pastures.
Most of the hundreds of statutory authorities operated independently of other local agencies; the Guardians of the Poor, who handled relief of the indigent, vagrants, idlers, and others commonly despised by eighteenth-century society, were a notable exception. They were usually connected by the laws with parish and sometimes county and borough governments. But they had no ties, neither responsibilities nor claims, to any agency of the ministerial governments: their accounts were not audited, they published no accounts or reports, their actions passed uninspected by anybody, and yet they possessed the power to arrest, detain, and punish the poor in their charge.
This freedom to act irresponsibly came from the form of their creation and from Parliament’s indifference. The special authorities got their bearings not as the result of a considered policy of Parliament or the government, but from the initiative of interested local groups. The Local Acts which set them up did not enter the full debates of either house, but usually were discussed only in small meetings by the members of the counties and boroughs to be affected by their passage.
Thus these special authorities, like the Municipal Corporations and the Quarter Sessions, operated unchecked by the Privy Council or the Assize Judges, and virtually ignored by their parent, the Parliament. In this way the localities were governed—the poor supervised, the streets improved, the marshes drained, the roads built and maintained, and a variety of other essential services provided, or unprovided—all without a governing policy or without a central direction. The result was, in the fine phrase of the Webbs, “an anarchy of local autonomy.”15
VII
There may have been a kind of anarchy in the practices of the special authorities, but virtually alongside them, indeed within the traditional order, a new fiscal and military state had taken hold of a crucial part of public life. That part consisted of war and all that went into making it. The alteration of the state began after the Glorious Revolution and continued throughout the eighteenth century. After 1688, the means by which it transacted business changed in profound ways. A large bureaucracy took form, the money the state took in grew, military and naval forces assumed enormous powers, and an unprecedented national debt was incurred. The element common in all the changes, of course, was money. Had the people of England heard Benjamin Franklin declaim that the only certainties in life were death and taxes they surely would have agreed. Death might be put off but not taxes, for wars were expensive and demanded payment.16
The tax on land had long provided most of the revenue the state needed without borrowing. But by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the land tax was no longer enough. Not surprisingly, as the requirements of the state increased, Parliament, dominated by landowners, looked elsewhere for revenues even as rates on land increased. Excises answered the demand for money, or a part of it, throughout most of the eighteenth century, including the years of the American war. Excises on a vast array of items—soap and salt, beer and spirits, cider, paper, and silk, among other things consumed by ordinary and mighty folk alike—replaced land as the largest source of revenue from taxes. Such a resort today would be considered regressive, but such levies are relatively easy to collect, and the list of consumables taxed can always be increased. Increased to be sure, but not always without protest, as the riots over cider before mid-century demonstrated.17
Customs, that is, duties on trade, also increased as commerce grew in the century. British merchants sent their ships all over the world long before the American Revolution. What they brought back could be taxed, and was—though if the duties were raised too high, smuggling followed. Money from such taxes ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of naval war. Most of the time the Royal Navy proved itself an able defender of British ships, but on occasion it failed.18
All these efforts to finance the wars of the century proved insufficient. Probably no one in Parliament expected them to yield all the money needed. The government relied more and more upon borrowing, and as it did so, private sources of several sorts, such as banks and stock funds, appeared to take up the financial slack. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as a private company and two years later began issuing stock, on which it paid a dividend. The bank proved to be an essential source of loans to the government almost from the moment of its founding. The debt owed to it and other lenders grew in the course of the century; in 1763, when Britain made peace with France, it amounted to £130,000,000.19
All this money, the taxes and loans, went toward the support of the fiscal-military state. Inevitably with the demands of war—Britain after the Glorious Revolution fought wars with France and her allies in three lengthy periods, 1688–1697, 1702–1713, and 1739–1763—an administrative structure evolved. What must have seemed at times to be an inordinate number of departments were created or enlarged; their names had a familiar ring—Customs, Excise, Salt, Treasury, Navy Board, Exchequer. But their size, the numbers of clerks, scribes, copyists, and bookkeepers were at first surprisingly large. Customs, for example, had 1,313 men in 1690; not quite twenty years later there were 1,839, and in 1770, on the eve of the American Revolution, 2,244. The Excise department went from 1,211 to 4,066 in these years. “Revenue officers”—those who collected taxes—tripled in the years between 1690 and 1782. The wars of the eighteenth century drove this growth as nothing else could have.20
All the organization, the growing complexity of administration, the increase in revenues, the expansive control of the Bank of England, and the growth of the debt underlay a comparable transformation of the British army and navy. For in the hundred years following 1688 both organizations trebled in size.21 Their growth was not steady: not surprisingly it occurred most rapidly in wartime; in peacetime shrinkage took place, especially in the army. But war in the century assumed what was almost a reliable form and the increases in arms and ships seemed to be irresistible.
The ebb and flow in the numbers of soldiers in service over the course of the century exceeded a comparable flux in sailors. Britain had for several generations relied upon foreign mercenaries when it entered the struggles on the European continent, a practice not abandoned in the eighteenth century. Hiring mercenaries entailed paying them for service only; because they did not have to be maintained in times of peace, the army could conserve resources. The navy in peacetime accomplished something similar by paying off crews and laying up ships. Still, the capital investment made by the navy in ship construction involved a very considerable cost. The army’s expenses included nothing quite comparable.
There was little disagreement in the eighteenth century about the use of these forces. The navy’s purpose seemed obvious to most ministries—to protect the home islands from invasions, usually and properly feared from France. It followed from this mission that the fleet, or most of it, should be kept in “home waters.” Home waters did not always mean the ports of the English Channel, and almost never did they refer to such ports after 1730. About that time Admiral Edward Vernon, and soon afterward Admiral George Anson, insisted that the “Western Approaches” (the area from Cape Clear on the Irish Coast to Finisterre) provided a much more suitable environment for the purpose of guarding the home country. Their reasoning recognized how disruptive, sometimes paralyzing, the prevailing winds from the southwest could be for ships in the channel. These winds, and in the winter the storms they brought, blew up the channel scattering and sometimes sinking ships and making defense impossible.22
This traditional function of the navy did not prevent the Admiralty from sending detachments of the fleet to other parts of the world. The British Empire was large and was made much larger with the great triumph in the war with France at midcentury (1756–63). But the fleet’s primary use was not then or afterward conceived to be blessed by what modern historians call a “Blue Water Policy”—the advancement of trade and colonies by naval might. The navy in fact did not think of its mission in terms of any grand policy or strategy. It is untrue that the navy did not think at all, but the truth was that it did not have the institutional apparatus, or the habit of mind, for long-term planning. While state organizations found themselves transformed, naval leadership, though enlarged, did not include planning staffs. Admirals might have a secretary, and a clerk or two, or perhaps a midshipman to keep their affairs in shipshape order, but nothing more. The Navy Board had more mundane matters to look after, the procurement of ships and men foremost. The First Lord of the Admiralty represented the navy, or, more accurately, the Admiralty Board, in Cabinet, but neither he nor any board laid down concepts of strategy for the fleet. For the most part no scholarly or professional literature existed to guide thinking about the nature of war at sea. There were manuals of navigation, and others on gunnery, and ship construction, but not much more. The complexity and the changes found so easily in the fiscal-military state clearly had their limits in the navy.23
So also did they in the army. Army life organized itself around the regiment. Leaders of regiments and of the armies they made up were aristocrats, most with only the flimsiest interest or knowledge of the larger contours of war. Officers owned their commissions—they, or their fathers, had bought them—and except for rare individuals and occasions, most confined their interest to the immediate terms of life in the regiment. Because the government relied so heavily on local militia and foreign mercenaries for defense, the regular army only rarely emphasized the kind of professionalism that later became so common.24
By midpoint in the eighteenth century the fiscal-military state had assumed mature form. The resort to the debt and the deep structure of tax collection and fiscal management had proved itself, and the administrative apparatus—from clerks, scribes, revenue agents among a host of others right up to sub-ministers—had entrenched itself into what was now a familiar order. And Britain had learned how to wage war and how to insert the means of waging war within the old political system of patronage and hierarchy.
VIII
The Webbs’ phrase also describes the situation of the American colonies before the American Revolution. All but Georgia had been founded in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century, though all were under the supervision of Britain, they pretty well ran their own affairs. The general outlines of their formal relationship to the Crown were known, but their objective situation—their virtual autonomy—was not. The disparity between reality and what was imagined in England is not surprising: the distance between England and America was great and communication imperfect, and no very enlightened colonial administration which might have explained each to the other existed.
The colonies had been founded under the authorization of the Crown, and governmental authority in them had always been exercised in the king’s name, though rather ambiguously in the three proprietary colonies, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and tenuously in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the two corporate colonies. What had lasted long apparently seemed best left unchanged. The administrative structure on which the Crown relied to “govern” the colonies was old and never really adequate to govern the vast holdings in the New World. In England the Privy Council and the Secretary of State for the Southern Department did the actual work of administration before 1768. The Privy Council’s primary responsibilities lay elsewhere, or its interests did; and the chief concern of the Secretary of State for the Southern Department was relations with Europe. For advice the Secretary relied on the Board of Trade, an advisory body primarily concerned with trade.25
If this structure made for confusion because responsibility for the conduct of colonial affairs was not clearly placed, the differences among the colonial governments themselves added to it, as did the problem of communication among governments separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The one relatively steady hand in this structure was provided by the Board of Trade, which funneled information received from the colonies to the Secretary and relayed his instructions to governors and other officials in America. For a time early in the eighteenth century the Board lost influence as certain English officials succeeded in curbing its authority. But in 1748 the Earl of Halifax became its president and increased its influence and his own. In 1757 Halifax was made a member of the Privy Council; his appointment alleviated the confusion in colonial administration, for he remained president of the Board of Trade.
When Halifax resigned in 1761, the Board lost influence and the colonies lost an intelligent administrator. Administrative order never again really attained the level reached at midcentury. The most important effort to establish such order made between Halifax’s retirement and the Revolution was the creation in 1768 of the office of the Secretary for Colonial Affairs, a department charged with supervision of the colonies. Unfortunately, this office aroused the jealousy of other ministers and fell into the hands of inept secretaries.
At another time in British history, administrative inefficiency, even stupidity and an absence of understanding, would not have mattered much. But late in the century it did. Administrative agencies did not make policy on crucial matters, but they contributed to it by supplying information and advice. And they had a responsibility to keep the colonials and the ministry in touch with one another. A well-conceived structure staffed by enlightened and well-informed personnel could prevent mistakes policymakers might make and could assist in the drafting of successful policy.
The makers of colonial policy included Parliament, though important aspects of its relations with and authority over the colonies were unclear in the eighteenth century. Parliament had of course defined the economic relations of England to the colonies in a series of statutes, most passed in the seventeenth century. Acts of navigation and trade had confined colonial trade to ships owned and sailed by British and colonial subjects, and they had regulated colonial trade in other ways largely to the benefit of British merchants. In the eighteenth century, before the revolutionary crisis began, Parliament had also attempted unsuccessfully to stop the importation of foreign-produced molasses into the colonies, and it had placed limits on the production of woolens, hats, and iron. Yet despite these statutes, the extent of Parliament’s authority to legislate for the colonies had not been closely examined by anyone. When it was, it became a center of controversy.
The common presumption in England, wholly unexamined, was that all was clear in the colonial relation. The colonies were colonies, after all, and as such they were “dependencies,” plants set out by superiors, the “children” of the “mother country,” and “our subjects.” The language used to describe the colonies and their subordination expressed certain realities. The colonial economy had long been made to respond to English requirements; the subordination in economic life was real, though not absolute. Moreover, there was a theoretical basis for the subordination: several generations of writers had analyzed mercantilism, a theory which described state power in terms of the economic relations of the imperial center to its colonial wings. Mercantilism had evolved over the years from “bullionism,” which had defined power largely in terms of gold, to a sophisticated set of propositions about exchange, balance of trade, manufacturing, and raw materials. Whatever the emphasis, the versions current in England in the middle of the eighteenth century prescribed a distinctly secondary position for colonies on any scale of importance.26
Although political thought offered much less on the colonies, the political realities seemed as clear as the economic. The mother country sent out governors who acted in the king’s name; Parliament legislated for the colonies; the Privy Council reviewed the statutes passed by their assemblies, and the Crown retained a veto. In America the law was English and so were most political institutions.
The sense of superiority and the snobbery that underlay all the theory were far more important than any of the formal statements of mercantile or political thought. For this sense permeated, or seemed to, all ranks of Englishmen conscious of American existence. And it may be that the colonials in America, in the peculiar way of colonials, accepted both the truth of the explicit propositions and the unconscious assumption that they somehow were unequal to the English across the sea. Certain it is that the most sophisticated among them yearned to be cosmopolites, followed London’s fashions, and aped the English style. If this imitation did nothing else, it confirmed the prevailing feeling in Britain that the lines of colonial subordination were right and should remain unchanged.
