American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

Alan Taylor “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,” W.W. Norton, 2016, 480 pp.

All nations have their myths and the United States is no exception.  Alan Taylor presents the truth about our revolution, showing that in fact it was a civil war with at best forty percent of the population supporting it.  In the end, at least 60,000 Loyalists fled the nation for other parts of the British Empire.  And, it was bloody: Twenty-five thousand Americans in the military died in the war, 1 percent of the population, more deaths proportionally than in any other war in our history except for the Civil War. The war went on for eight years, the longest in our history until Vietnam, and it touched all parts of the country, including its western regions.

My Notes:

Historians have estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of the 2.0 million whites in the colonies in 1775 were Loyalists, or about 300-400,000 men, women and children. Numerous black Americans were also Loyalists and some moved to the Province of Nova Scotia, British Canada, after the war.

About 40% were Patriots and another 40% were neutral.

Pg. 2:  As far back as 1832, Nathaniel Hawthorne in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” concisely conveyed the internal essence of the revolution.  He recognized that the struggle was our first civil war, rife with divisions, violence and destruction that civil wars bring about.  However, historians and politicians often miscast the American Revolution as the polar opposite of a bloody revolution; bloodier revolutions occur elsewhere.  They recall the American version as good, orderly, restrained and successful when contrasted against the excesses of the French and Russian revolutions.  During the Revolutionary War, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred Indians, who returned the favors.  Patriots also kept one-fifth of Americans enslaved and after the war 60,000 dispossessed Loyalists became refugees. 

Pg. 20:  After 1700, British America imported 1,500,000 slaves: more than four times the number of white immigrants.  The slave trade killed a tenth of the enslaved, primarily from disease, during transit across the Atlantic from West Africa. 

Pg. 63:  The Treaty of Paris (1763) ended the French and Indian Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France.  In the terms of the treaty, France gave up all its territories in mainland North America, including Florida, effectively ending any foreign military threat to the British colonies.  (Nearly all of Spain’s 3,700 subjects withdrew from Florida in 1763, most went to Cuba).

Pg. 84:  In 1774 the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which broke with the British constitutional tradition that had excluded Catholics from government.  Unlike the Irish, Canadian Catholics could own land and serve on the governing council.  Troubled by defiance in other colonies, Parliament sought to secure Canada by mollifying French Canadians.

Pg. 115:  During the 1760s, the colonists imported 365,000 slaves: more than in any preceding ten-year period.  Most of the enslaved lived in the southern, plantation colonies, accounting for 60 percent in South Carolina and 40 percent in Virginia.  In the mainland colonies as a whole, the enslaved comprised a fifth of the population.  The leaders of Virginia and Maryland worried that they had more than enough slaves for their economy and too many for security from revolt.  To discourage slave imports, their legislators levied heavy provincial duties, but the Crown vetoed them at the behest of British slave traders. 

Pg. 157:  In Paine’s Commonsense he pushed for immediate independence, a union of thirteen states, and republican governments for those states.  All three goals broke dramatically with past experience and received wisdom.  No colonies in the Americas had yet revolted from their mother empire; past bickering by the colonies augured poorly for a union; and almost all former republics in Europe had been small, contentious, and short-lived.  Yet, Paine argued that Americans could triumph by combining all three gambles: on independence, union, and republic.  Seeking one alone would certainly fail, but the combination would prove invincible. 

Pg. 206:  Benedict Arnold, in return for betraying the garrison at West Point in 1780 and embracing Loyalism, would receive £20,000 payment, a lifetime pension of £500 annually, and a commission and command as a major general in the British service.  The British hoped that such a high profile defection would discredit Congress and initiate a cascading series of conversions.  (Because the plot at West Point was unsuccessful, these amounts were significantly reduced; Arnold died in 1801 at the age of 60).

Pg. 212:  Revolutions breed civil wars: triangular struggles in which two sides compete for civilian support.  British leaders wishfully believed that most colonists were Loyalists temporarily cowed by a minority of brazen and bullying rebels.  In fact, although committed Patriots were a minority outside of New England in 1775, the British confused the colonial majority, which preferred to remain neutral, with committed Loyalists, who, in fact, were a minority even smaller than the Patriots.

Pg. 274:  During the eighteenth century the Great Plains Indians acquired horses by trading or raiding the Hispanics of New Mexico to the southwest.  The horses seemed a divine gift to people engaged in bison hunting.  By killing more bison, the Great Plains natives became better fed, clothed, and housed than most colonists.  They raised the tallest children on the continent.  The alluring combination of horses and bison drew more native nations to relocate onto the Great Plains. 

Pg. 284:  The French and British valued their West Indian colonies more than anything on the North American continent.  Sugar cane raised by slave labor enriched planters and the merchants who transported sugar and rum to Europe.  Taxes on slave imports and sugar exports generated greater revenue for the rival empress than any other colonial trade.  So, the British subordinated their war effort in North America to the defense of the West Indies.  They even drew on the New York garrison as a reserve to bolster West Indian defenses at moments of crisis. 

Pg. 295:  On October 17, 1781, in Yorktown, Cornwallis opened negotiations to surrender his army.  Cornwallis further crippled British prospects by accepting surrender terms that denied his Loyalist troops the protection of prisoner-of-war status.  Unlike the redcoats, Loyalists taken at Yorktown risked harsh punishment, even execution, as deserters and traitors by the Patriots.

Pg. 338:  Not until November 1777, more than a year after declaring independence, did Congress agree on “Articles of Confederation and perpetual union.”  Under the Articles, the states conceded only a few, limited powers to Congress: to wage war, conduct diplomacy, and arbitrate disputes between the states.  The Articles required ratification by all thirteen states to become operative, and any future amendment also required unanimity, which discouraged any change.  The Articles built an alliance of states rather than a cohesive nation. 

Pg. 370:  The Articles of Confederation were so ineffectual in providing government that, in private letters, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and Washington worried that great property might need a king’s protection.  In March 1787 Washington conceded that potential “utility” and perhaps “necessity” of a switch to a monarchy but worried that such a counterrevolution would shake “the Peace of this Country to its foundation.”

Pg. 373:  Contrary to modern belief, the founders did not intend to create a national democracy.  Instead, they designed a national republic to restrain state democracies which they blamed for the union’s woes.  By restraining democracy in the states, nationalists hoped to save republican government from a descent into anarchy or a switch to monarchy.  They wanted also to preserve the union from splitting into several smaller confederacies, or many individual states, which would contest boundaries and settle differences with bloody wars. 

Pg. 381:  The Constitutional convention had to compromise with the southern states, whose population was made up of 40% of slaves (versus 5% in the north).  By adopting the three-fifth clause allowing representation to count each slave as equaling three-fifths of a citizen, prolonging the allowance of slave importations for twenty more years (until 1808), and providing a fugitive-slave clause, the constitution defended slavery.  The delegates understood that southerners would reject a constitution that did not secure their property in human beings. (On April 30, 1789, Washington became President).

Pg. 434:  Conservatives today embrace Jefferson’s stances against taxes and for states’ rights, but skip over his opposition to a military establishment, his unease with inequality of wealth, and his push to separate church and state.  They like a Hamiltonian military but not Hamiltonian taxes to pay for it. The diverse founders generated contradictions that continue to divide Americans.

Pg. 446:  The First Amendment to the Federal Constitution barred the federal government from creating a church establishment, but that ban did not apply to the states—which became political battlegrounds between religious conservatives and their evangelical critics.  However, none of the states created after the revolution provided for a church establishment, and those of the old states gradually toppled: New York in 1777; Virginia in 1786; South Carolina in 1790; Maryland in 1810: Connecticut in 1818; New Hampshire in 1819; and Massachusetts in 1833.  After the war, more college students studied law than divinity as lawyers supplanted ministers in social prestige. 

Pg. 458:  Growing steadily during the eighteenth century premarital pregnancy peaked during the revolutionary generation at a third of brides. 

Pg. 476:  Contrary to the wishful thinking of many Patriots, slavery did not wither away after the revolution.  Instead, it became more powerfully entrenched in the southern states.  From 700,000 in 1790, the number of enslaved doubled to 1.5 million in 1820. 

Pg. 480:  The Civil 1861 War erupted over the terms of westward growth—that is, whether new states would permit slavery.