In his masterful study of British colonial policy during the period from 1772 to 1775, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), English author Nick Bunker subjects the actions of Parliament and the Crown to a withering critique that illuminates how the Anglo-American conflict became inevitable.

Britain Meant Business

By the 1770s, according to Bunker, Great Britain had come to view itself as an essentially commercial nation, so that even people whose social or economic status was based on owning land agreed that commerce was its lifeblood. Or to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s observation about America in the 1920’s, they believed the business of Britain was business. In line with this mindset, Britons generally regarded the American colonies as having only one purpose and that was economic. As Bunker memorably puts it, “the British scarcely saw the colonists at all as anything more than a bundle of economic resources or a destination for convicts. Often the American people themselves remained almost invisible, mere accessories dotted about in a landscape where, in British eyes, the objects in the foreground were fields of tobacco, sacks of rice, and barrels of molasses.”

The author notes that to Lord North (prime minister from 1770 until near the end of our war for independence) and his colleagues, the colonists’ demands for liberty rang hollow. They appeared as merely a sham protest designed to obscure the Americans’ obsession with evading taxes levied by Parliament. The upshot of all this was that the United Kingdom’s devotion to trade often reflected a narrow materialism that limited the vision of policymakers in London, so that they came to view their overseas empire—in North America, the West Indies, and India—as nothing more than a vehicle for enhancing Britain’s wealth. These possessions were simply too valuable to surrender, as they constituted a profitable system of global trade.

Tea→War

The Boston Tea Party in December 1773—that is, the dumping of the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, which proved a seminal event on the road to war—was a reaction to British efforts to thwart the epidemic of colonial smuggling by allowing the company to sell tea at prices that undercut smugglers while propping up the struggling company and reasserting Britain’s right to impose taxes in America, in this case on tea. What the Crown’s ministers failed to grasp, Bunker argues, is that “the prevalence of smuggling was simply another side effect of a speculative empire, and of a fiscal system that relied too heavily on the taxation of commodities that lent themselves to illegal traffic.”

Over time, the New World customers and clients that were the bedrock of an empire based on maritime trade developed their own ambitions and reinterpreted political principles and ideas they had acquired from the mother country to suit their own circumstances. The inevitable clash that emerges from Bunker’s masterful analysis derived from the failure of British statesmen to accept that the economic and political aspirations of the American colonists were valid. By the 1770s, the political culture that extended from Charleston to Boston was radically different from Great Britain’s, and that divergence could not be reconciled. Parliament’s legislative reaction to the destruction of tea by Bostonians—known as the Coercive Acts in London and the Intolerable Acts here—was intended to punish, in the view of those lawmakers, sinful and disorderly mob rule while upholding British sovereignty and Parliament’s will on this side of the Atlantic. They had yet to realize neither could be enforced without war—and not even then. You might say their hopes of doing so were emptea (ouch).

Semiquincentennial + 1

Today marks the 251st anniversary of the so-called “Boston Massacre.” (Actually, to a diehard New York Yankees fan, this was the first Boston Massacre and is not to be confused with the second such event that occurred at the hands of the Boston Red Sox during games four through seven of the 2004 American League Championship Series—but I digress.)

“Massacre” is the label that was applied by Patriot propagandists to the action committed by occupying British soldiers when they fired on an unruly crowd of about two hundred demonstrators on the night of March 5, 1770, killing five civilians and wounding six others—and that label obviously stuck. The youngest to die was a seventeen-year-old apprentice to a joiner, Samuel Maverick, and the oldest a forty-seven-year-old sailor, Crispus Attucks, who was part Indian and part African American.

The mob that gathered in a snow-filled King Street before the Boston Customs House verbally abused a detachment of nine redcoats, including one officer, and some tossed snowballs and pieces of ice at the Crown’s men. The latter were part of a garrison that had been deployed to Boston in the fall of 1768 with the intent of discouraging popular opposition to British colonial policy in what London authorities deemed to be the epicenter of American unrest. Whether the initial shots that night were fired deliberately or by accident is still unknown, but this proved to be a milestone event on the road to war. The imperial troops were withdrawn from the city but would return four years later. Meanwhile, the colonists’ version of the tragedy was disseminated throughout the colonies and published in Britain.

Also on this Date

March 5, 1770 was also the day on which Frederick, Lord North, delivered his first speech in Britain’s Parliament as prime minister. Ironically enough, it was notable for requesting that the House of Commons repeal all duties imposed on its American subjects under the Revenue Act of 1767 except that on tea. Despite this initial conciliatory approach to the colonies, His Lordship—who had previously endorsed Parliament’s right to tax America—bore ultimate responsibility for the policies that precipitated the American insurrection, in particular the East India Tea Act of 1773, That is, according to Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy in The Men Who Lost America, his noteworthy study of British civil and military leadership during the Revolution (Yale University Press, 2013, p. 51).

North’s advocacy of a tea tax on the colonies to support Britain’s East India Company led to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 in protest—featuring the colonists’ unceremonious dumping of company tea into the town’s harbor—and Parliament’s retaliatory Coercive Acts in 1774. Known as the Intolerable Acts on this side of the Atlantic, those decrees abrogated self-government in Massachusetts, fined the colony, closed Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the lost tea, and required colonists to house the King’s soldiers on demand and even in their private residences. Furthermore, British troops reoccupied the city.

Parliament’s punitive measures ultimately precipitated an armed rebellion, and Britain responded by embarking on an extended military misadventure that would severely deplete its blood and treasure. The eight-year-long effort to quell the insurgency cost the mother country some forty thousand casualties and over fifty million pounds. In the process, the prime minister was subjected to a blistering litany of abuse by the British press as he became the scapegoat for the Crown’s military failures. In short, things went south for North.