Origin of the States, Supplemental 3: Independence

This is a supplemental, the third of what's turned out to be three ... we'll call it part 13c of 50 in an occasional series.

 

The idea to do a supplemental discussion of American independence came to me early in the process of writing these state things, as independence marks a transition in how states came about that I thought might need some context. It's just a nice coincidence brought on by my glacial writing pace that I get to this one today. Today happens to be Independence Day in the United States, and that little building with the steeple across the lawn in the picture up above is Philadelphia's Independence Hall. In that building 241 years ago, on July 4, 1776, a batch of mostly rich guys in wigs representing each of the 13 colonies I've discussed gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States of America that erased the Colonies and changed them into states. For people from foreign lands who don't know, that anniversary's a big deal for us, and we all get today off work to go eat hot dogs and blow our fingers off with illegal fireworks.

 

But why, exactly, did all those rich guys in wigs gather in that building at the start of a hot summer in the first place, and how did they accomplish what they set out to do?

 

The why's a more complicated question than it seems in a lot of the stories we tell about our national origin. I tend to simplify the whole thing myself in discussions with a short answer that tracks back to those consequences I mentioned after the French and Indian War: Americans have a long history of not wanting to pay for anything. This answer tends to bother people who prefer their history to have things like context or depth, as there's a lot more to it than just a tax revolt. Honestly, I think the whole thing was inevitable anyway. The colonists had been away from the homeland for too long, and the cultures on their separate continents were evolving in too many different ways. The increasing tensions just needed a trigger, and the heart of that trigger turned out to be a tax revolt. So I cling to the underlying truth of the statement. The Americans didn't want to pay for anything.

 

Let's backtrack a little. It's 1763, and young King George III and his Parliament have just spent an enormous amount of money defending the colonies from the French. (They also tossed a ton of cash at Europe they maybe didn't have to spend, something a lot of Americans would bring up, but to George III, that was beside the point.) Meanwhile, the colonists have been paying almost nothing in taxes--the average American in 1763 payed about 1/25th as much in taxes as his cousins back in England. So the British came up with a perfectly fair idea. Why not ask just a little more? Not a lot. It's not like they were going to make the colonies pay off the entire national debt. Just little things, a couple of tiny taxes here and there to help balance the books. You know, for King, and country and all that.

 

They started with a tax on imported molasses, the main ingredient in the production of rum, among other things. Of course, there'd already been a tax on imported molasses since 1733, but the Americans had gotten really good at smuggling molasses past the authorities, and when smuggling wasn't an option they just bribed the tax guys into overlooking the shipment. The Molasses Act of 1764 would cut that 1733 tax in half--it was actually a tax cut--but would make evasion a lot more difficult to manage. So the colonists would owe less tax ... but they'd actually have to pay it.

 

Well, this got everybody into a snit, so Parliament repealed the tax in 1766. But they kept trying other taxes. The Stamp Act of 1765 required all the paper sold in the colonies to have a stamp you had to pay the government to get. The Townsend Acts of 1767 instituted taxes on all sorts of things, including glass, lead, paint, paper and tea. Every new tax ticked the Americans off just a little more than the last one, and people started organizing increasingly more effective boycotts of this or that. In turn, every protest and boycott ticked off the guys in Parliament, who responded with increasingly more peevish acts that just made things worse. None of it made any sense to Parliament. It wasn't like they were asking the Americans to surrender their first-born sons. All they wanted was just a couple of cents here and there. Just pennies a day, the price of a cup of tea, and you, too, can have an army of British regulars to keep the Indians on their side of the mountains.

 

So what was the American problem? The most popular explanation among today's historians and yesterday's Patriots involves the popular slogan on the tips of every colonist's tongue in 1776: "No taxation without representation." The problem, this argument said, wasn't that colonists didn't want to pay their taxes, but that taxes were being imposed on the colonists by a body (Parliament) the colonists did not elect and in which they weren't represented. And to be sure, It's true that while every colony had always had its own elected assembly--the Virginia House of Burgesses, for instance, was 145 years old when the Molasses Act came down--these assemblies had no say in Parliament. There was no place in the system for the will of the colonial people, and any duty imposed on the people without their consent was nothing short of tyranny. (The word "tyranny" is always very popular among hyperbolic anti-tax folks, but in this case, it was particularly funny coming from so many people who owned slaves.)

 

The thing is, while I'm sure a lot of colonists believed this line of thought with every fiber of their being, I tend to think this was more a rhetorical dodge than anything. It was an argument with just enough truth to make the colonists feel justified in their indignation, but I think the issue ran much deeper than that. Sure, maybe King George could have done something crazy like maybe give the colonists a few seats in Parliament or something, but that wouldn't have fixed the underlying problem. The greater problem was simply that for too long, the various British governments of various kings, queens, and lords protector had left the colonists to pretty much fend for themselves. The guys in London had a tendency to get caught up in European affairs--and, at least once, in a decade-long revolution of their own--and administering a bunch of colonies full of (let's be honest) religious nuts and backwoods dopes took a lot of effort. For more than a century, it had made more sense to let the colonies just take care of themselves. And the colonies had gotten used to that freedom and had taken great advantage of it, spreading themselves out into the woods wherever they wanted to go, waging wars against the Indians and against each other, making money, losing money, building little plantation empires and city-states and personal fiefdoms that acted more and more like there wasn't anybody named George worth worrying about. Most of them were still loyal to the Crown in the 1763, sure, but that was only because the Crown had little to no effect on their lives. The minute some George tried to change that ... well, look out!

 

The final straw came after Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773. This one wasn't so much a tax as it was a trade regulation designed to prop up the failing British East India Company by helping it sell down its massive backlog of unsold tea, while at the same time providing a subtle political dig at the whole anti-tax movement. There'd long been this convoluted process involving the sale of tea in the colonies that depended in part on smuggling, and the Tea Act would result in a lot of middle men losing a lot of money. So one night in December of 1773, a bunch of rowdy Boston guys went aboard a ship full of tea parked in Boston harbor and tossed the whole shipment overboard. They were orderly about the whole thing, being careful not to damage any cargo but the tea, and they even left money to pay for a padlock they had to break, but they got their point across. And from that moment, it was on. A lot of people in Great Britain who'd been sympathetic to the colonists' argument decided suddenly they were all a bunch of hooligans, and Parliament passed a quick set of laws designed to isolate and punish Massachusetts. This only unified a bunch of colonials who usually didn't agree on much around a common enemy. Things escalated quickly, and in April of 1775 somebody in the Massachusetts militia fired a shot heard round the world.

 

I haven't spent a lot of time giving the Revolutionary play-by-play on these pages, but the shorthand version is that just before all those rich guys in wigs signed their Declaration, they told George Washington to turn about 10,000 farmers into soldiers so they could go shoot British people. Washington's men spent the next six years between recurring episodes of starvation and frostbite not getting cornered by a better trained and better equipped force run by idiots. Now, I mean no disrespect to the soldiers of the Mother Country, but even a brief glance at the actions of the British military leadership and its ministers back in London is more than enough to prove this was far from Great Britain's finest hour. One general managed to lose an entire army of 7,000 men in 1777 because he couldn't figure out how to march from Canada into upstate New York. Another in 1778 let an army of barefoot farmers who only lasted more than a week because George Washington was some kind of wizard corner him in New York City. And then there was Cornwallis, who got chased out of the Carolinas by a bunch of hillbillies in 1780 and picked the most indefensible spot in Virginia to set up base in 1781. And this doesn't even take into account the large and powerful navy the British had available that they hardly used. They used the navy for troop transport, like, one time. Most powerful navy in the world, and the British used it as a ferry. So, yeah ... Yorktown.

 

Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, and representatives of Great Britain and the former colonies signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the war in 1783. The United States of America were finally their own thing, independent and free and ready to take their place in the world. And it was full of people who were no longer colonists, optimistic people who saw a vast continent to their west that was just waiting to be tamed, and that's what they set out to do. The West was waiting for them, just waiting for them to triumphantly carve it all up into new states with names nobody yet knew. There were states out there just waiting to be made, and it was finally time for them all to go do it.

Done