Britain’s Atlantic Empire in an Age of Revolution

The outcome of the American dimension to the Seven Years' War is well known, but it seemed not disastrous for France's Atlantic Empire because while France conceded the loss of Canada to Britain, it recovered what seemed the more valuable French Caribbean islands.^[2167] For Britain the peace terms meant that it was now responsible both for defending Canada against any future French attack and for protecting sig­nificant French Catholic and Native American populations.

Creole elites in all empires regarded such augmentations with suspicion, and re­sistance occurred wherever such innovation was attempted in various European Atlantic empires. However, in the case of Britain's mainland colonies, resistance led to rebellion for several reasons. First, departure from custom and practice appeared sharper there than elsewhere because of the extensive territories and responsibilities that Britain had acquired under the peace terms. Second, the elites in the various mainland colonies, who had been taking principal credit for victory in the recent war, had difficulty in accepting that the British government should dictate how the fruits of victory should be distributed. And, as Craig Yirush has explained, difficulties also arose because settlers in Britain's mainland colonies were unique among European settler populations, in considering as fundamental rights the liberties to which they had lain claim, and which had gone largely undisputed in Britain while regula­tion was lax.

The problem became acute when the British government calculated that it was necessary to impose further taxes upon the settler population to help defray both war debt and the recurrent cost of defending a greatly expanded empire. The biggest challenge was that, after 1763, Britain had to protect sea access to Quebec from a newly constructed naval base at Halifax to prevent France from attempting the re­covery of its lost province, including upwards of 60,000 subjects. Britain had also to provide troops in garrison for several positions along the Great Lakes and southward toward the Gulf of Mexico to manage and protect the Native American populations and the trade they generated.⁴⁶ To resolve the fiscal problem, the Westminster par­liament imposed new taxes on its colonies without sanction from their colonial assemblies.

It is a truism that the adherence of colonists in thirteen of Britain's American mainland colonies to the principle of no taxation without representation drove them to challenge the connection with the imperial government, and ultimately to establish the United States of America. The taxation issue did indeed persuade some elite members to take up arms against the crown, but others, in an increasingly di­verse free population within the thirteen colonies, had more immediate reasons to conclude that the British government no longer served their interests. For ex­ample, Presbyterians of Scottish and Ulster origin who were a conspicuous pres­ence on the frontier close to Native American nations had been precocious during the course of the Seven Years' War in developing what Benjamin Bankhurst has termed “a sense of imperial interconnectedness and collective destiny.”⁴⁷After the war they quickly became disenchanted with British rule because the government had assumed a new role as protector of the rights of Native Americans from the incursion of settlers upon their lands.

⁴⁵ Yirush 2011; Bang and Bayly 2011.

⁴⁶ Anderson 2000, 518-528.

⁴⁷ Bankhurst 2013, 32.

⁴⁸ Griffin 2007, 152-180.

⁴⁹ Taylor 2010, 16-17.

Political opinion was divided in Britain over waging war upon its own colonists, but it is less frequently recognized that opinion within the thirteen colonies was also divided over challenging the king's authority. Therefore, it was only a coalition of sectorial grievances that made it possible for leaders of the American insurgency to mobilize opposition to crown authority on a broad front, and we learn from Tim Breen that revolutionary leaders experienced difficulty both in persuading members of their communities to join their cause and in preventing backsliding.^[2169] Even then, at least 38,000 colonists abandoned their homes and property to settle in Upper Canada rather than oppose their king, while thousands more loyalists be­came refugees in Britain and on Britain's Caribbean islands.^[2170]

At the same time, the British authorities believed that it was a coalition of dis­parate interests rather than a risen nation that opposed them in America and, as P.

If Britain remained hopeful that it would recover what had been lost of its Atlantic Empire, it was determined to lose no more. The government therefore moved de­cisively to quell the insurrection that broke forth in Ireland in 1798 and provided Lord Cornwallis who, in 1781, had surrendered to the French at Yorktown, with the opportunity to redeem his reputation. Cornwallis proceeded swiftly in the summer of 1798 to bring an end to the draconian campaign against the insurgents that had led in the summer of 1798 to the loss of at least 10,000, and perhaps as many as 30,000, Irish lives.^[2173]

The insurrection in Ireland attracted support from populations as disparate as middle-class Presbyterians in the northeast of Ireland and Catholic peasants in the southeast, principally because of shared resentment over the privileged posi­tion enjoyed by the minority Church of Ireland Protestant community. The United Irishmen who led the disturbance were republican separatists who cited the lib­ertarian principles of both Revolutionary America and Revolutionary France, and attracted military support from the French Directorate. This latter association explains why no money was saved by Britain in confronting the rebels.

The continuing—and increasingly Catholic—immigration from Ireland swelled the ranks of the poor in the United States, especially in Philadelphia and New York, and thus accentuated the existing polarity between the wealthy elite and those wishing to achieve social equality in a new republic. Social leveling held great ap­peal for the exiled radicals who became anti-Federalists in the politics of New York and Pennsylvania, where they both promoted the republic that had been denied to them in Ireland and aspired to spite Britain by attacking Canada from the United States.^[2175] These Irish radicals also encouraged fellow immigrants to identify with their adopted country, with the result, as Alan Taylor has calculated, that Irish­born soldiers made up 53 percent of the immigrant enlistments in the US army that confronted the British forces on the Canadian border during the War of 1812.^[2176]

The fact that the re-integration of Britain's Atlantic Empire remained a polit­ical possibility until 1815, when Britain finally accorded full international recog­nition to the United States and agreed to withdraw British troops from its western boundary, suggests that those who led the thirteen colonies into rebellion, and their successors who led the emerging independent colonies toward statehood, proceeded from two false assumptions. First, they disregarded the essential military character of Britain's Atlantic Empire, and fostered the vain belief that the govern­ment would compromise rather than confront its opponents. This expectation was not even dispelled by the determination shown by Britain to maintain the integrity of its empire in the war effort of 1774-1783, and by the readiness of Britain to con­front the United States when it precipitated the War of 1812.

The second miscalculation of the revolutionaries was in disregarding the en­during loyalty to the British monarchy and empire fostered by many of the former colonists. This, as was noted, became manifest when the move to independence got underway and many colonists, particularly in areas more closely linked to England by kinship or commerce, sought refuge in various parts of the empire rather than forsake their king. Others who remained to become citizens of the United States retained a residual loyalty to the empire and especially its respect for rank. Their yearning increased as the revolutionary movement became more populist, and many who identified themselves as Federalists—in opposition to the Republican anti-Federalists who promoted social leveling—aspired, and perhaps conspired, to lead back into the empire those parts of the United States, usually close to the border with Canada, where they had remained socially dominant. These individuals may have been exceptional, but the citizenry of the United States displayed scant respect for the institutions of government in those early years that they were reluctant to cede taxes to maintain them or to serve in the army to defend them.^[2177]

Under these circumstances, frontiersmen of Scottish and Ulster Presbyterian de­scent, and recent Irish immigrants of both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds who had settled in east coast cities, featured prominently as Republicans and anti­Federalists in the politics of the early United States, and to that extent identified themselves as opponents of empire. Many in both segments were poor, and some of the Irish were smarting from the humiliation of 1798 or had been radicalized by the United Irishmen in their midst. The stance these two segments of the popula­tion took should not be taken to suggest that all Irish or Scots, whether Protestant or Catholic, were opponents of Britain. On the contrary, many Irish (Catholic as well as Protestant) supported Britain and its imperial causes, and it must have come as a shock to the Irish soldiers serving in the United States armies that invaded Canada in the War of 1812 to find that the majority in the ranks of the opposing British force were Irish Catholics. These were following in the tradition of their co­religionists who had been serving clandestinely in the British army for decades, and who volunteered in great numbers after 1793 when the ban against Catholics bearing arms was cancelled by a British government desperate for troops to con­front Revolutionary France. Those Irish Catholics who served in Canada were also setting a precedent for the Irish Catholic soldiers who would constitute a major component of Britain's imperial armies throughout the nineteenth century, which justifies the observation of Stephen Howe that “the Irish role in British imperialism has been a subject even less researched than has Irish anti-imperialism.”^[2178]

Presbyterians, particularly those of Ulster provenance, were to establish an even closer identification with empire in the decades ahead, and it was particular circumstances in Ireland and on the American frontier of the 1790s that brought significant numbers of them to challenge British imperial interests. Once these moments had passed, Ulster Presbyterians featured among the most consistent supporters of the British crown as they melded into a common Protestant, and anti­Catholic, phalanx consolidated by Freemasonry and membership in the Orange Order. Moreover, in the decades following the War of 1812, Ulster Presbyterians who migrated to North America tended to settle in Upper Canada, in preference to the United States. In Canada they were joined by significant numbers of Irish Catholics, although the Catholic migratory preference was already overwhelmingly for the United States.

Those Scottish settlers in North America who served against British forces in the American War of Independence and again in the War of 1812 were also ex­ceptional because, since 1745, Scots had a distinguished record of crown service. Therefore it is unsurprising that most of the officers were Scots who commanded the Irish Catholic troops who defended Canada in the War of 1812.^[2179] The many Scots who had made their careers in the British West Indies, and who continued to flourish there, also remained steadfastly loyal. Moreover, Scots (including Catholic highlanders as well as Protestant lowlanders) became the most numerous element among the newer immigrants who settled in Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century.

The people who gained most from their association with Britain's Atlantic Empire during the turbulent years of 1775-1815 were those who were most debased: slaves of African descent. Some slaves had recognized that the War for America presented them with the possibility of achieving freedom, either by deserting their plantations or enlisting as soldiers in the British army. While a few satisfied their ambition, these aspirations were not encouraged by British commanders more concerned to win over potential loyalists, particularly in the Southern colonies where slavery was entrenched, than to risk further alienating the white population by liberating slaves. Slaves did better in the War of 1812, when runaways were welcomed as freemen into both the British army and navy. The partitioning of Britain's Atlantic Empire that followed the War for America also brought benefits for the slave population in those colonies remaining under British control, because, once the government was freed from the lobbying power of slave owners on the American mainland, it could respond positively to moral pressure from British evangelical groups to legis­late an end to the slave trade in 1807, and the abolition of slavery within its empire in 1833.^[2180]

During these decades the British government also made some amends to the Native American populations for the sufferings they had endured. This was as a re­ward to the “nations” in the Great Lakes region who had switched allegiance from the French to the British side toward the close of the Seven Years' War when it be­came clear that the French could no longer defend them from the British settlers who coveted their lands. The British government lived up to the promises of their generals to maintain Native Americans on their ancestral lands, even at the price of driving white frontier settlers into the arms of those fighting for independence from Britain. Then, after Britain had lost its thirteen colonies, the government continued to pro­tect Native American lands from incursions from the United States, and this loyalty was reciprocated in the War of1812, when military support from Native Americans proved critical in enabling the British forces to maintain their positions in Canada.^[2181] However, as Britain finally opted for peace with the United States in 1815, the chief victims of that decision became their former Native American allies who were left to stand alone against the inexorable westward push of the United States.

This chapter has drawn attention to what Britain's Atlantic Empire meant at dif­ferent times for the various subjects of the British monarchy, and not for English people alone. It concurs with recent assessments that the ideology underpinning that empire was an English construct, but it has alluded more than have authors such as David Armitage and Linda Colley to the extent to which, over time, ideology was diluted by pragmatic compromises.^[2182] By drawing attention to developments in Ireland, Scotland, the West Indies, and Canada, as well as to those in Britain's North American mainland colonies, the chapter has also demonstrated how force was deployed repeatedly both to create and to maintain Britain's Atlantic Empire. The extent to which that empire became adaptable and inclusive over time also becomes evident when account is taken of the ever more diverse populations that were enlisted, or volunteered, to make the empire work. As these various peoples undertook to serve the empire, they would have understood the adjective “British” to mean that all who wished to belong were expected to defer to English cultural norms. However, they would also have learned from experience that this implied exclusiveness was as much theoretical as actual since the authorities had repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to accommodate those who, to different degrees, deviated from these norms, provided they displayed public respect for them and refrained from flaunting their own religious or cultural differences. In this way, and on these terms, peoples as diverse as English non-conformists, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians, Irish and Scottish Catholics, and German Lutherans and Pietists had an opportunity to profit from, and enjoy a place within, Britain's Atlantic Empire. And, as we have seen, the British authorities ultimately countenanced a participa­tory role even to former African slaves and Native American nations. The force­fulness that characterized Britain's Atlantic Empire, as well as its growing ability to accommodate diversity, points therefore to continuities between Britain's imperial experience in the Atlantic and what is frequently described as Britain's second em­pire of the nineteenth century.

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