24. Polarization in England and the German

0:00Volume 4, Chapter 24, Polarization in England and the German Response to Renting Hessians During 1775 and early 1776, as we have seen, the American conflict escalated and intensified step by step, as the military clashes widened on land and at sea, as the British cracked down bitterly on the revolutionaries, as militant measures were taken against Americans loyal to Britain and as the Continental Congress opened diplomatic relations, organized the war effort and opened the ports to foreign trade and supplies in defiance of the time-honored British laws of trade.

0:48As the conflict got underway and for many months thereafter, most of the American leaders had conservative aims and goals. They aimed not at all at independence, but at intensifying the old pressure of the boycott to bring Britain to her senses and to abandon her recent policy of aggressive imperial domination. Others, at least, realized that Britain would adopt a hard-line policy of crushing the rebellion in exorably pushing the Americans into greater conflict, but only a handful of the most radical and prescient leaders fought eagerly for the maximum goal, independence.

1:33They realized that France would only be interested in aiding an American movement that would aim for independence and not for eventual reconciliation and strengthening of the British Empire. Moreover, they saw that in the difficult war ahead, only American independence would provide the necessary inspiration for waging the struggle. The radicals realized, as Curtis Nettles has written, that the Americans had arrived at a crossroads of history. Backward, the road led to monarchy, serfdom, oppression. Ahead was visible the trace of a new path leading to emancipation, freedom and self-government.

2:18Should Congress take the road backward to the oppressions of the old world, or build a new road to the summit discernible in the distance. It was independence that offered an inspiring prospect, nothing less than the creation of a new nation, a great republic dedicated to rights of man. New England, the center of liberalism and democracy, with its tradition of virtual independence, had little difficulty in visualizing American independence. But as long as Massachusetts was the focal point of conflict with Britain, it and the rest of New England had to tread warily in Congress. Leveling New England was under enough suspicion as it was from the other colonies, and it would have been suicidal for it to take the lead in advocating independence, a most unpopular concept, in 1775.

3:16Massachusetts and its chief radicals, the Adams's, had to lie low, waiting for the lead for militancy and eventual independence to be taken by Virginia, the foremost and the most radical colony in the South. This was a further consideration in the decision to give George Washington command of the Continental Army. He was an uncommon blend of impeccable conservative on social and political matters, and yet, Yet a militant in the fight against Britain. Yet the radicals had a difficult row to hoe indeed, for Congress began firmly in the hands of conservatives who would not consider independence, such leaders as John Jay, James Dwayne, John Alsop, Philip Schuler, and Philip and Robert Livingston of New York, John Dickinson, James Thomas Wilson and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, Thomas Johnson of Maryland, Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, Thomas Lynch in the Rutleges of South Carolina, and Dr. John Zubly of Georgia.

4:25Even New England had conservative delegates, Silas Deane of Connecticut, and Thomas Cushing and the waffling and petulant John Hancock of Massachusetts. If such a formidable array, the Adamses, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, could only fume in private and await the passage of time that they firmly believed would be on their side. The superior insight of the radicals was partly due to their superior information on political conditions in Great Britain and on the formidable strength of the Tory forces. The prime source One of the authors of this information was Arthur Lee, who was functioning as a one-man committee of correspondence from London from the late 1760s, sending his news and evaluations to the Adamses and other radical leaders.

5:18Lee and his other brother William, a merchant settled in London who had become important in London politics, reported clearly the feebleness and decline of the Whigs and Radicals, as well as the triumphal successes of the imperialist and Tories and the subservience of a corrupt parliament. The American Radicals soon saw this estimate of the temper of the British government confirmed as the King brusquely refused even to receive Dickinson's olive branch petition and issued the staunchly hardline Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775. The proclamation absurdly denounced the Americans as rebels and traitors who had now brought long-laid designs and traitorous conspiracies to open rebellion and war.

6:14The King announced that he would bring traders to justice and condine punishment. This was quickly followed by a royal order to seize the ships of Americans or all those trading with America. And the royal authorities expressed their determination to proceed against the Americans as open and announced enemies of the state. In England, the Whig and liberal Many English merchants were beguiled by the temporary expansion of markets in Europe, aided by the recent peace between Russia and Turkey, and by the lure of government war contracts.

7:03The mass of the people were seduced by a wave of patriotism as well as the desire to force the Americans to pay part of their tax burden. The aristocratic Whig leadership, always inclined to luxurious indolence, decided against the efforts of Edmund Burke to arouse them and instead to give up and absent themselves from Parliament. Burke did his best to work for peace on his own and roused peace petitions from London and his constituency in Bristol, but all in vain. Indeed, more people in Bristol addressed their support of the government on the American War. Burke's persistent appeals to the Marquis of Rockingham and the Whigs to oppose the war vigorously was not simple impetuosity.

7:53It was based on profound insight into the proper strategy for a party truly in opposition to the existing regime. Vigorous opposition, though in a weak minority at the time, would not be at all futile. On the contrary, local opposition would inform people of the available alternative to which they might turn in anger when present policy became bankrupt. bankrupt. But for such an angry turn toward a radical change of the system, there must be skilled leadership and direction. There must be a vanguard. As Burke wrote, to bring the people to a feeling, as tends to amendment or alteration of system, there must be plan and management. All direction of public humor and opinion must originate in a few. He vainly urged on the Whigs a large and powerful nationwide petition movement, which would remain permanently in operation as a network of local committees of correspondence to serve as the lever of dynamic political change.

9:02The eloquent young Charles James Fox, a son of Henry Fox, enclosed to the Whig party, also argued against the Britons' war against the Americans. The Pittites opposed the war too, but were enfeebled by the chronic illness of Lord Chatham. Leading individual Whigs did make their mark by refusing to serve in the armed forces against the Americans, and these came to include Lord Effingham, an army officer, and the great Admiral Augustus Keppel. Meanwhile, the radical movement in Britain had fallen into rapid decline. John Wilkes' triumphal entry into Parliament in 1774 as well as into London politics marked the beginning not of new triumphs for the Wilkite movement but of its collapse.

9:55In any age of Tory ascendance, Wilkes proved to have been a far better radical leader in disgrace than in positions of power or influence. In fact, having realized his civic and parliamentary ambitions, it seemed that he no longer sought, or depended on, the acclaim of the lower orders of citizens. He was still a liberal opposed to the war, however, and he warned that victory would be hollow, since the Americans could not be kept permanently in subjection, even by large forces of occupation. In order to abandon the radical position, Wilkes was to remain for a while an undistinguished liberal member of Parliament. But he began to follow the classic ever rightward path of the renegade radical until, after two decades, he died in the odor and sanctity of the new Toryism. The radical cause in 1776 had become more abundant in Britain, a state aggravated by Parliament's recent re-imposition of a high tax on newspapers, crippling the cheap and popular press that had served as a vehicle for gaining support of the cause from the

11:11masses. Of the radicals, only the doubty Reverend John Horn managed to remain active. He took up a collection in London in June 1775 for widows and orphans of the Americans murdered by the British troops. He was promptly sent to prison for his audacity. It is significant of the decline of British radicalism that his arrest evoked none of the popular agitation generated by the imprisonment of John Wilkes in 1763. In their desperate state, the various liberal and opposition groups began to draw hesitantly together and to become increasingly radicalized by the American crisis.

11:57They soon realized that their only hope lay in a drastic British defeat at the hands of the Americans. Openly favoring the American cause, they grew more radical in their proffered solutions. Burke, who habitually dealt in terms of utility and expediency or else tradition, now acknowledged in part the validity of the American stress on their rights. Yet he was gradually being outflanked on his left. The Earl of Shelburne and other Chattamites, along with the London radicals, called for repeal of the declaratory acts asserting full parliamentary sovereignty over America, including the right of taxation. And Charles James Fox was calling for repeal of every British measure toward America passed since 1763. With the liberal and radical movements weak and in disarray, the field was wide open for the hard-line apostles of force and suppression.

13:02Bunker Hill was characteristically taken not as a signal to stop and think, but as a stain to Britain's Honor, to be avenged as quickly and forcefully as possible. Only Lord Dartmouth, the Colonial Secretary, stood out against the war policy of the Cabinet, but with no success. So widespread was British support for suppression that the manufacturing centers of Manchester, Lancaster, Liverpool and Bristol presented pro-government addresses. Driven Known by the King and by the War Party in control of the rest of the Cabinet and of popular opinion, the equivocal Prime Minister Lord North was forced to press the war with vigor. He raised troops, relieved General Gage and Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, who were considered dilatory by the War Party, and sent five Irish regiments to America. In the The autumn of 1775, moreover, the two cabinet moderates lost their posts. The Whig, Duke of Grafton, went into opposition in bitter protest against the war, and Lord Dartmouth lost the key post of Colonial Secretary to hard-line Lord George Germain, a man bitterly

14:21opposed to appeasement of the colonies. Strengthening hard-line dominance over public opinion was as a pamphlet published in 1775 by the eminent Tory literary critic, Samuel Johnson. With his accustomed perceptiveness, Johnson, in Taxation, No Tyranny, warned that the logical conclusion of the libertine and American hostility to taxation was no taxation at all, or anarchy. The World War Petitions, inspired by the government, denounced the sophisticated arguments and seditious correspondence of a few disappointed men who were responsible for diluting the Americans into rebellion. The Ministry propounded a similar line. Indeed, more serious than the imprisonment of John Horn was the arrest on a charge of treason of the radical alderman and leading London banker, Stephen Sayre, whom Burke and other Whigs were refused permission to visit in prison. Similar treatment for the Whig leaders was hinted to be in the offing, though Sayre was eventually able to sue successfully for false arrest. Having agreed to prosecute the war vigorously, North attempted to offer peace terms to the Americans. After a great

15:48Deal of Wrangling with Germain and the War Party, he won an agreement in May 1776 to send as peace commissioners to America General Sir William Howe and his brother the Whig Admiral Richard Lord Howe, the newly appointed commander of the fleet in American waters. This wrangling was a waste of time for the peace terms merely amounted to a demand for for American Submission in Exchange for Instituting North's Rejected Plan of Conciliation and a Plan to Consider American Grievances. There was not the ghost of a chance that the Americans would submit. As Professor Richeson comments, the terms thus held out were those a victorious and reasonably benevolent mother country might have granted to discouraged and chastised But the Americans, of course, were neither beaten nor discouraged.

16:47Lord North's first task in prosecuting the war was to raise 20,000 men to send to the American colonies. Rather than annoy the British people by raising the troops at home, he determined to use Britain's vast wealth to hire mercenary troops from other governments. He turned first to Russia, which had been substantially helped by Britain to defeat Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74. Russia had installed King Stanislaus as its puppet ruler in Poland, and in 1768 the liberal Polish Country Party, or Confederation of Bar, led by Counts Joseph and Casimir Pulaski rose in rebellion against the king.

17:36By 1772, the Polish rebellion was crushed, and Poland suffered the loss of one-third of its territory and half of its population in the first partition by Russia and Prussia. Turkey had decided to aid the Polish rebels, earning the belligerent attention of Russia. But Russia's gratitude to Britain for its aid in the war had cooled. The German-born Empress Catherine the Great had come strongly under the influence of Prussia, and Frederick the Great of Prussia was peeved at Britain for what he considered unsatisfactory peace terms after the Seven Years' War. After much backing and filling and seeming agreement, Catherine finally refused Britain's request.

18:26Roth turned next to the Dutch. Ever since the accession to the English throne of William of Orange in 1688, the Dutch House of Orange had been subservient to Great Britain. They had been governed during the first half of the 18th century by the Libertarian Republican Party, which pursued a policy of thoroughgoing decentralization, minimal government and profitable neutrality in Europe's wars. During the war of Austrian succession, Britain had engineered a coup by the House of Orange. The Republic was overthrown, and William IV of Orange was installed as Stadtholder of the Dutch provinces. Now Great Britain asked the Dutch to supply the needed troops, specifically the Scotch Brigade.

19:15This brigade originally consisted of Scotsmen, but was now largely comprised of Walloons from the southern Netherlands. The House of Orange was, of course, willing to agree, but the Prince of Orange was by no means the autocratic ruler of Holland, and the Republican-led assemblies of most of the provinces vetoed the scheme. Eloquent opposition to providing the troops was expressed by John Dirk, who, citing English depredations upon the sea and upon Dutch commerce, declared that the Americans were contending for their liberty just as the Dutch themselves had fought for their independence as rebels against Spain in the late 16th century.

20:00Leading the successful opposition to troop aid to Britain in the interior Dutch province of Overiesel was a man destined to become one of the most important figures in the international revolutionary movement in the near future. The nobleman, J.D. van der Kaepelin-Totepole, who broke precedent by making public his views in the secret discussion within the provincial estates, van der Kaepelin, who also led the movement to abolish corvée servitude by the peasants of the province, was in contact with British radicals and was soon to correspond with the revolutionary governors of Connecticut and New Jersey. The substantial number of Republican merchants in the Dutch provinces also expressed their opposition to British dictation by happily engaging in illicit trade with the rebellious Americans and with the French, St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies serving as a crucial entrepôt in the American trade.

21:08Twice rebuffed in their search for mercenary troops, the British now turned to some of The Petty Princes of Western and Southern Germany, who were always eager to augment their incomes by renting out their troops. In January 1776, Britain received into its service 30,000 German mercenaries from six principalities, including Hesse and Brunswick, of which three-fifths The myths came from Hess Castle. Of the 30,000 troops, 7,500 were to perish during the war, either in battle or of disease. Of the remaining 22,500, 5,000 were to desert to settle in the United States.

21:57Some of these German troops were mere hired killers or soldiers of fortune. Many were imbued with deep sympathy for the American cause, proving to be reluctant fighters at best and often deserting outright to the American ranks. In their discontent, the German troops at least partially reflected a wave of enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause that was sweeping the intellectuals of Germany. The Enlightenment had deeply penetrated into German thought and Rousseau and Voltaire were read as widely in Germany as in America. The rights of man were keenly admired and the German intellectuals saw with enthusiasm that here was a new type of war, a war for liberty, a revolutionary war for an ideal feel very different from the familiar European war of mercantilistic and dynastic plunder.

22:57The rental of the troops to counter-revolutionary England ignited a torrent of protest in Germany. The German poets were in the forefront of the protest, including the young poets Goethe and Schiller. The poets were moved to use the American struggle for liberty to protest directly or obliquely against their own petty despotisms. The poet, Johann Voss, called courageously for Germans to drain the cup of tyrant's blood to triumph. Leading the campaign was the romantic poet and newspaper editor of Hortenberg, Christian F.D. Schubart, who had recently founded a lively paper to help launch Germany's political press. Also avidly enthusiastic for the American and Revolution was the poet Johann George Jacobi, who hailed the Americans as really battling against despotism in all countries. An editor of a sentimental women's magazine, Jacobi rhapsodized over revolutionary activities by the women of Pennsylvania. Another prominent romantic libertarian poet of the revolution was Christopher M. Whelan, former jurist and and Professor of Philosophy, who founded Der Tutsch Merkur, the most lively and popular

24:21and most politically oriented paper in Germany. Schubart and Jacobi were soon suppressed by their respective princes, but Whelan carried on, and he was joined in advocating the American cause by more sober thinkers. These writings These included a constitutional defense of the American case and of American smuggling, and an attack on the navigation acts by Jacob Movillian, professor of military science at Castle. Movillian was greatly influenced by the first modern economist, the French physiocrats who had evolved a rigorous libertarian theory that included a commitment to a strictly laissez-faire to their economy and to the natural rights of man.

25:08Movilon declared the lesson of the American Revolution to be that, to avoid revolution, the German states must abolish the statist repressions at home, including religious intolerance, monopolies, guilds, taxes on agriculture, and economic burdens on trade and commerce. Movillian's physiocracy, in turn, influenced his colleague, the statesman and economist Christian von Dome, who became the political commentator for Whelan's Mercure. Von Dome criticized the vicious trade monopoly of the British mercantilist system and pointed out that American independence would be a great boon to the world if only because it would smash this monopoly.

25:56Monopoly. He thereby summed up the German, indeed the European, radical hopes for the American Revolution. Its success would create new routes for trade, new types of industry, new connections between nations in various parts of the world. It can give wider circles of influence to the enlightenment, new keenness to popular thought, new life to the spirit of Freedom.