English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Ian K. Steele 9780773560406

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Revisiting The English Atlantic in the Context of Atlantic History
PART ONE: CONTEXTS
1 Changing Spaces: Reconstructing the Political Economy of Empire
2 Ian K. Steele as Military Historian
PART TWO: POLITICAL ECONOMY
3 The Talented Mr Blathwayt: His Empire Revisited
4 Patronage and Governance in Francis Nicholson’s Empire
5 Policy and Patronage: Governor William Gooch and Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1727–1749
PART THREE: THE MARITIME ATLANTIC
6 William Crashaw’s Bridge: Bermuda and the Origins of the English Atlantic, 1609–1624
7 Forests of Masts and Seas of Trees: The English Royal Forests and the Restoration Navy
8 Plying the Northernmost Atlantic Trading Route to the New World: The Hudson’s Bay Company and British Seaborne Empire
9 The Atlantic of the Rival Navies, 1714–1783
PART FOUR: AMERINDIAN AND MILITARY FRONTIERS
10 “Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh”: Reassessing Haudenosaunee Relations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1723–1755
11 Atlantic Microcosm: The Royal American Regiment, 1755–1772
12 In the King’s Service: Provisioning and Quartering the British Army in the Old Northwest, 1760–1773
PART FIVE: SOCIAL HISTORY
13 Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader, Christian Shaman, and Christian Sachem
14 Overcoming Nausea: The Brothers Hesselius and the Great American Mystery
15 Patriarchal Authority in Revolutionary Virginia: Connecting Familial Relations and Revolutionary Crises
16 “We Are No Less Friendly to Liberty Than They”: British Antislavery Activists Respond to the Crisis in the American Colonies
Conclusion: The English Atlantic Created a Man of Steele Who Reciprocated by Creating It
Appendix 1: Ian K. Steele’s Calendar of Scholarly Writing, 1966–2006
Appendix 2: Completed Graduate Theses Supervised by Ian K. Steele, 1974–2006
Index
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Citation preview

english atlantics revisited

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English Atlantics Revisited Essays Honouring Professor Ian K. Steele edited by nancy l. rhoden

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn 978-0-7735-3219-9 Legal deposit third quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Grants in aid of publication have also been received from the J.B. Smallman Publication Fund, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Western Ontario, and the Ley and Lois Smith Fund, The University of Western Ontario. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication English Atlantics revisited: essays honouring Professor Ian K. Steele / edited by Nancy L. Rhoden. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735–3219-9 1. Great Britain – Colonies – America – History. 2. North Atlantic Region – History. I. Steele, Ian K., 1937– II. Rhoden, Nancy L. (Nancy Lee) E19.E54 2007

909'.0971241

C2007–901509-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 Baskerville.

For Ian, teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Revisiting The English Atlantic in the Context of Atlantic History xiii Nancy L. Rhoden

pa r t o n e : c o n t e x t s 1 Changing Spaces: Reconstructing the Political Economy of Empire 3 Richard R. Johnson 2 Ian K. Steele as Military Historian John Shy

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pa r t tw o : p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y 3 The Talented Mr Blathwayt: His Empire Revisited Barbara C. Murison

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4 Patronage and Governance in Francis Nicholson’s Empire Randy Dunn 5 Policy and Patronage: Governor William Gooch and Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1727–1749 81 Stacy L. Lorenz

pa r t t h r e e : t h e m a r i t i m e a t l a n t i c 6 William Crashaw’s Bridge: Bermuda and the Origins of the English Atlantic, 1609–1624 107 Neil Kennedy

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7 Forests of Masts and Seas of Trees: The English Royal Forests and the Restoration Navy 136 Sara Morrison 8 Plying the Northernmost Atlantic Trading Route to the New World: The Hudson’s Bay Company and British Seaborne Empire 174 Michael Dove 9 The Atlantic of the Rival Navies, 1714–1783 Daniel A. Baugh

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part four: amerindian and military frontiers 10 “Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh”: Reassessing Haudenosaunee Relations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1723–1755 235 Jon W. Parmenter 11 Atlantic Microcosm: The Royal American Regiment, 1755–1772 284 Alexander V. Campbell 12 In the King’s Service: Provisioning and Quartering the British Army in the Old Northwest, 1760–1773 Michelle A. Hamilton

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pa r t f i v e : s o c i a l h i s t o r y 13 Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader, Christian Shaman, and Christian Sachem 345 David J. Norton 14 Overcoming Nausea: The Brothers Hesselius and the Great American Mystery 372 Kenneth A. Lockridge 15 Patriarchal Authority in Revolutionary Virginia: Connecting Familial Relations and Revolutionary Crises Nancy L. Rhoden 16 “We Are No Less Friendly to Liberty Than They”: British Antislavery Activists Respond to the Crisis in the American Colonies 450 Margaret M.R. Kellow

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Conclusion: The English Atlantic Created a Man of Steele Who Reciprocated by Creating It 474 John M. Murrin Appendix 1: Ian K. Steele’s Calendar of Scholarly Writing, 1966–2006 495 Appendix 2: Completed Graduate Theses Supervised by Ian K. Steele, 1974–2006 507 Index

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Acknowledgments

In the preparation of an anthology, a lot of people deserve credit and thanks. When the anthology is a festschrift that began as a conference, even more thanks are owed. The conference from which this collection sprang was funded with contributions from those attending and with donations from many departments and offices at the University of Western Ontario (uwo): the History Department, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Centre for American Studies, Faculty of Social Science, English Department, Faculty of Arts, Vice President Research, and the History Department, Academic Dean, and Principal of King’s University College. For their support and for their encouragement, I would like to thank especially those colleagues in the History Department who wore a variety of other administrative hats at the time: George Emery, J.J. Ben Forster, Roger Hall, and Andrew Johnston. Other administrators throughout the university community kindly provided support: Ruth Brouwer, at King’s College; Kathleen Okruhlik, dean of Arts; and Douglas Kneale, chair of the English Department. Generous support from Brian Timney, dean of Liberal Arts; from Ted Hewitt, associate vice president (Research and International Relations); and from Nils Petersen, vice president (Research), made this conference possible. George Emery deserves a special mention not only for serving as a memorable master of ceremonies at the roast and banquet, but especially because his initial encouragement sparked the fire under me to organize the conference. The staff of the History Department handled many inquiries and provided organizational assistance. Other members of the uwo staff assisted me in various ways with conference arrangements. The high quality of the conference papers made the event both memorable and academically fulfilling, and I take this opportunity to thank each one of the conference presenters and authors whose work is included in this volume. In order of appearance at the conference,

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Richard Johnson, Randy Dunn, Stacy Lorenz, Ian K. Steele, David Norton, Daniel A. Baugh, Michael Dove, Neil Kennedy, John Shy, Alexander Campbell, Jon Parmenter, Kenneth Lockridge, Nancy L. Rhoden, Margaret Kellow, and John Murrin all delivered engaging papers. New essays by Michelle Hamilton, Sara Morrison, and Barbara Murison prepared since the conference each add substantially to this volume. At the conference, Daniel Baugh, Richard Johnson, Kenneth Lockridge, and John Shy all did double duty, not only presenting their own fine papers, but also commenting on others in their panels, and Regna Darnell provided a comment on the Amerindians and Captives panel. John Murrin offered a thorough plenary comment at the conference, only to revise it in the past many months to incorporate all changes. All of those who attended the conference deserve my hearty thanks for their support, their questions, and their willingness to revisit the English Atlantics. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, Philip Cercone’s early and sustained support has been much appreciated, as have the efforts of coordinating editor Joan McGilvray and many others at the press. The two anonymous readers of the manuscript provided detailed and helpful assessments of this long manuscript, for which I am particularly grateful. Publication of this book is made possible by grants from a variety of sources. The author acknowledges the assistance of the J.B. Smallman Publication Fund and the Faculty of Social Science, uwo; the Ley and Lois Smith Fund, uwo; McGill-Queen’s University Press; and the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. Of course, Ian Steele deserves a warm thank you as well, not only for all of his support over the years and for his influence in reading, guiding, or inspiring many of these essays, but also for the good-natured way in which he accepted, with characteristic humility, the praise and embarrassment heaped upon him at the conference. With much gratitude and admiration, this book is dedicated to him. Nancy L. Rhoden London, Canada July 2006

introduction Revisiting The English Atlantic in the Context of Atlantic History nancy l. rhoden

Not long after the 1986 release of Ian K. Steele’s The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community, I found a copy of it in the bookstore at the University of Western Ontario, where Steele was professor of History and where I was then an undergraduate history major. In my first reading, I learned that the Atlantic was not a moat but a highway, or more accurately, an efficient waterway that united rather than divided members of the English Empire. Later, as a graduate student studying at Princeton under John Murrin, whose intellectual breadth left its own imprint, and still later as a beginning professor in the United States, subsequent rereadings revealed to me more complex findings and more penetrating implications. Steele’s vision of a unified English and later British Atlantic world, so readily accepted by myself as a Canadian undergraduate, offered a distinct counterpoint to prevailing assumptions of American exceptionalism, an alternative to the notion that the British colonies had been uniquely American from their earliest beginnings. English migrants had brought their cultural and material assets and formed new societies, emulating various aspects of British constitutionalism, politics, religion, and society, but in response to their new natural and human environments, they created ultimately different polities that would converge into a coherent whole in the American Revolution. Or so many colonial American histories told the tale. Steele’s work clearly and deliberately stopped in the 1740s, well in advance of the American Revolution, to avoid the teleology of that “countervailing trend.”1 He correctly argued that the Revolution’s shadow distorted our understanding of the earlier period. In any event, he saw unity and convergence occurring well before the Revolution, and it was British rather than American in origin.

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In my later rereadings, another implication of The English Atlantic became clearer: its elaboration of improvements to communication and the increasing ease and regularization of Anglo-American trade by the first decades of the eighteenth century implied that the whole conceptual problem of English cultural inheritance versus American innovation needed to be recast. The continuous, even escalating, character of communications meant that inheritance and innovation could not be properly paired as a dichotomy but had to be understood as an ongoing, interactive exchange between unequal parties.2 Steele’s volume was one of a handful of path-breaking books published in the mid-1980s that helped to make transatlantic history fashionable again and from which the phenomenon of Atlantic studies emerged.3 By that time the “imperial school” of the early twentieth century, with its emphasis on establishing transatlantic connections especially related to political institutions, had long fallen from favour as work of the old guard. It had already yielded in the 1960s and 1970s to new questions and methodologies embodied in the “new social history” and narrower fields of study that critics decried as overspecialization. Although many continued to study the history of empires throughout these decades, few, if any, willingly embraced the label of “imperial” historian, a term that was perhaps outmoded with its first use.4 By contrast, today almost every historian who studies early America is an Atlanticist. Of course, most in the early to mid-1980s did not have the foresight to predict the Atlantic’s future use: first, as a trendy new name for a transatlantic approach; and by the later 1990s, as a subdiscipline, or even as a new framework that presumes the utility of seeing the Atlantic basin, consisting of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas, as an integrated unit of study. Only with historical hindsight can we see that the use of the term “Atlantic” has exploded, causing the trend, in turn, to become institutionalized.5 Any unscientific scan of early American book titles published since 1990 demonstrates its overwhelming popularity. Universities now have Centers and programs devoted to its study and legions of graduate apostles spreading the word. Departments advertising for faculty positions search for Atlanticists, and conferences are dedicated to the subject. The Atlantic framework, particularly for the era from 1500 to 1800 but occasionally into the nineteenth century, now dominates the study of early American history. The origins of this Atlantic movement are diverse. Post-Second World War interest in anti-isolationism in the United States and the writings of journalists promoted the idea of a common Atlantic civilization with pluralistic, democratic values based on common JudeoChristian and Greco-Roman traditions. At its various stages, interest in Atlantic history can be linked to the rise of nato, the Cold War, and

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globalization. Academic trends in history, as well as other disciplines, have reinforced this perspective.6 Demographic and social historians studying European and American household composition promoted comparisons complementary to the Atlantic perspective. Maritime history and the history of commerce have long investigated the Atlantic as an arena of trade. Other historical questions about migration, of both free and forced migrants, recognized the Atlantic as both a setting and a subject, and a comparative approach to slavery predated the rise of the latest Atlantic history trends. Newer work on migration has depicted migration to America as an extension of domestic European patterns of mobility and as part of a single Atlantic labour community. Still other scholarship has emphasized ideas; in studies of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, historians of French history focused on the transmission of revolutionary ideologies between nations bordering the Atlantic.7 Although multiple sources in post-1945 historical scholarship contributed to a rising interest in the Atlantic, the roots of the Atlantic approach, at least for the English-speaking world, run still deeper. Its origin should be traced as well to the contribution of Charles McLean Andrews, the early-twentieth-century historian from Yale who wrote extensively on England’s colonization of America.8 Current trends in Atlantic history would appear to have built on many of Andrews’s central premises. Andrews urged that studies of the colonial era be undertaken independent of later developments while being thoroughly connected to the history of England’s institutions and their gradual overseas expansion. His transatlantic approach to the formal structures of governance and society explicitly encouraged colonial comparisons, even of mainland versus Caribbean colonies. As Richard Johnson has argued, Andrews’s perspective had “disparaged American exceptionalism,” but by the 1950s many historians, while retaining his approach of looking at America alongside Europe, had instead found contrasting worlds and, in turn, concluded that America had quickly differed from England.9 Indicative perhaps of the natural cycles of historiography, Atlantic historians are presently unlikely to embrace American exceptionalism, and many urge, as Steele did for communications, that an opposite trend of anglicization integrated the British Atlantic.10 Andrews had not used the term “Atlantic history,” and its reincarnation after the 1980s rarely became “the new Atlantic history.” For this, we can be thankful since the word “new” as part of a school of thought eventually breeds confusion: one need only think of students’ smirks and shaking heads when they hear that the “new social history” is not new. Although the new social history, as a label, paid homage to and acknowledged its links to earlier predecessors, “Atlantic history” does not

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so easily disclose its roots and at times even appeared to deny or disguise them. I recall sitting in the audience at a national American historical conference in the mid-1990s when presenters, in their understandable excitement, proclaimed Atlantic history to be a “brand new” perspective. Yet scholars had being writing Atlantic history all along, even before it was so labelled. This phenomenon also owed a great intellectual debt to Andrews, as well as to those many modern historians since him who had incorporated an imperial or transatlantic vision.11 I felt a little like the child in that fairytale who, after trying very hard to see the emperor’s fine new garments that everyone else admired, exclaimed, “But the emperor has no clothes!” Or maybe a more appropriate imaginary interjection would have been, “It is a very fine, attractive outfit with some new lace, but it has been remade from one of his old frocks!” Such an outburst would have been uncharitable and inaccurate, for there is much that is new about the Atlantic history approach, particularly since the mid-1990s, approximately when it emerged more as a distinct subfield. Its view that the Atlantic basin constituted a single unit of analysis has gone well beyond Andrews’s vision of the empire as the extension of English settlement, commercial patterns, and administrative policies. The lived experiences of women, African slaves, Amerindians, and non-English migrants can now fall under the Atlantic rubric in a way unimagined and unintended by Andrews, who gave little to no attention to matters of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion.12 Atlantic history has merged with the search for the colonial roots of American multiculturalism and globalization. What began perhaps as a more acceptable way to study empires now offers a partial antidote to partisan national histories, even if tensions may persist between Atlantic and national histories.13 If teaching US history from a world history perspective seems impossible in a single semester, then an Atlantic approach offers at least another potential solution.14 Atlantic history also possesses a potential for synthesis in that it demonstrates the links between colonies, people, and products from distant areas while not inhibiting local studies. As David Armitage convincingly argues, it may be studied as a zone of exchange (circum-Atlantic), as a comparative history (trans-Atlantic), or as the “history of any particular place – a nation, a state, a region, even a specific institution – in relation to the wider Atlantic world” (cis-Atlantic).15 Like my reading of The English Atlantic, my views on Atlantic history have changed, particularly as the Atlantic perspective has evolved and expanded. What was seen almost exclusively in terms of institutional structures in Andrews’s day now incorporates individuals and groups of diverse backgrounds. It has even redefined that most traditional of concepts – politics – now more broadly conceived to include

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the distribution and uses of power, competition regarding access to power, and the participatory, reciprocal relationships between the governing and the governed. The Atlantic perspective generally highlights diversity among its inhabitants and also its regions. Historiographically, Atlantic studies may be seen as an extension of that expansive, comparative vision that rejected New England as the microcosm of colonial America, those Thirteen Colonies that would later become the United States. Colonial British America, the term popularized by Jack Greene and J.R. Pole in their 1984 anthology, as a label and also as a framework, facilitated a comparative perspective that not only rejected the anachronism of studying the United States as a unit before it existed, but also highlighted the diversity of the colonies under British authority.16 No longer was it sufficient, as Andrews had done, to divide mainland colonies on the basis of the formal structure of their governments. Individual royal colonies or proprietary ones might have more differences than similarities. Instead, regional studies and individual colonial analyses pointed to great differences between the southern colonies in comparison with New England, but also to other points of distinction between neighbouring colonies. Islands of the British West Indies or northern regions like Hudson Bay, Nova Scotia, or Newfoundland need not be defined out of the picture as either early Latin American or early Canadian topics, for their depiction aptly illustrates the diversity of the English Empire. Studies of each area promote an understanding of the whole. All of these historiographical changes, of course, cannot be credited exclusively to the Atlantic history perspective, which has borrowed selectively from older models and which has adapted the transatlantic perspective to newer questions. Modern Atlantic history offers a powerful framework for historical understanding partly because it has merged many qualities of the “imperial school” with those of the “new social history.” Andrews would likely have been pleased, for he had warned his colleagues not to reject the old to embrace the new – in other words, not to ignore Europe in their study of American history.17 The new social history is indeed one of the most innovative developments in the study of history in the last half of the twentieth century. As historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton argue, its methods, information, and subjects embody the “antithesis of traditional history,” challenging both the narrative mode and the usual prominence of dead white men of European ancestry. The rise of this approach also coexisted with a shift away from questions about the structures of empire to queries about its social processes.18 The new social history’s monographs have deliberately divided history into discreet thematic topics, often emphasizing private more than public issues, the experiences of

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the non-elite more than those of the elite, the town rather than the nation, and diverse, multiple viewpoints, sometimes to the point of defying generalizations. In comparison with the new social history, Atlantic history need not consistently challenge elite history, but it has retained an interest in social questions, in the history of ordinary people, and in cross-cultural (European, African, Native American) interactions. Yet in most cases it attempts to enlarge rather than to subdivide our understanding of the past. The best Atlantic history achieves a delicate balance between depicting the diversity of the parts, one of the lessons of the many community studies and individual colonial studies of the past, but also the unity of either the empire or the Atlantic world. Most scholars continue to work within the traditions of imperial history and national frameworks in that few have accomplished, or have really aimed at, truly transnational research. Steele’s English Atlantic depicted the integration of the British Empire, and his subsequent work, as much as it elaborated competition between rival European powers in North America, still falls squarely within the British Atlantic model. It remains to be seen whether scholars will, in the years ahead, advance sufficient and compelling arguments to demonstrate not only the interrelatedness, but also the unity, of a transnational Atlantic world. At present, Atlantic history is best described as an approach or a perspective; it shares no common method and, despite its reigning popularity, is not quite a paradigm. As Bernard Bailyn cautioned, references to the so-called “Atlantic paradigm” must include the quotation marks.19 Neither Atlantic history nor the new social history is paradigmatic in the sense that either may be thought to represent a mutually exclusive way of seeing the past. The new social history has long existed simultaneously with more traditional political and military studies, with traditional economic, diplomatic, cultural, and religious history, and with narrative approaches. Likewise, Atlantic history has not replaced national histories but offers an alternative, potentially broader vision. The Atlantic history approach has been invigorating not only for its transnational and cross-cultural possibilities, but also for its contribution to recasting the character of empire. Historian Bernard Bailyn employed an ocean-friendly substitute for Fernand Braudel’s mountain-top view of history; as Bailyn perched himself on an imaginary satellite over the Atlantic, he found a way of viewing the larger trends, the swirling movement of people to North America.20 Yet Bailyn’s satellite also had the sophistication to zero in on specific groups and even individuals, so it did not reject the micro in favour of the macro. Just as Steele emphasized the continuous nature of communications, Bailyn’s

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examination of migration patterns also demonstrates the ongoing significance of Britain and Europe to American development. The resulting image of the British Empire is one of migrating masses of people, many of whom, particularly in the later eighteenth century, arrived from diverse non-English destinations, including Africa. The scale of forced African migration to America in this period demands a satellite view that encompasses the entire Atlantic basin. Other historical visions of the empire have also highlighted the concept of continued transatlantic exchange. Among others, Richard Bushman described the empire as a region of shared political values. Historians of religion have pointed to the spread of evangelicalism throughout Atlantic regions.21 Of course, historians dealing with trade have long acknowledged the centrality of a transatlantic approach, but a newer emphasis on consumerism has emphasized the process by which people living in various regions shared experiences. T.H. Breen has convincingly portrayed an empire of goods that forged a cohesive empire.22 Steele’s study of improved communications and shipping contributed to this redefinition of empire, particularly since it revealed not only the mechanisms of cultural and material transmission, but also suggested its consequences and its effects on the people. In depicting the British Atlantic, however explicitly or implicitly, as a cohesive unit that exchanged people, ideas, and goods, such transatlantic studies have recast the meaning of empire. Plurality and unity coexist: individual colonies, regions, and groups demonstrate the plurality within the English Atlantics, but patterns of integration simultaneously point to a single, unified entity. The Atlantic history trend is secure enough at this moment to be called not merely a fad, but at least a confident fashion. Given its current dominance, it is worthwhile to consider what questions it might not answer. Might its overwhelming use suggest that it is too expansive or that it already risks becoming a meaningless catch phrase?23 Although a tool in combating American exceptionalism and provincialism, can British Atlantic history avoid anglocentricism? Studying the parallel or even earlier attempts of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden to colonize America certainly puts the English efforts in context. Late and at first unsuccessful English colonization efforts do not seem to prove the inevitability of English victory. Yet an Atlantic perspective may still serve to reify the story of eventual English dominance and therefore potentially exaggerate English unity, even if it does recognize that the British invasion of America faced stiff resistance at times from rival imperial powers, Amerindian nations, or non-English migrants who resisted assimilation. Perhaps a truly international Atlantic perspective would guard against any possible exaggeration of English hegemony. As David Hancock

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described, what was once called English (or British), Dutch, French, Spanish, or Portuguese America is now often dubbed “Atlantic America.”24 Such a transnational approach, as opposed to merely a transatlantic one, presumes that the Atlantic formed its own cohesive community. If this was “an imaginary community,” whose imagination was at work, that of modern historians, of early modern contemporaries, or both? J.H. Elliott cautioned that the Atlantic world might well be a historians’ phrase.25 Steele, for his part, has argued that “[b]y far the most influential ‘imaginary community’ for the political, economic, and social life of European North America was the English (later British) Atlantic empire.” He acknowledges the strengths of the Atlantic approach, even as in his own witty way he plants a seed of doubt by reminding readers that “no one ever lived, prayed, or died for the Atlantic World.”26 Future studies may make clearer whether such a concept of an Atlantic world – as opposed to a British Atlantic empire – excessively collapses nationalism, thereby exaggerating a transnational unity that might have been surprising to contemporaries, or whether it verifies the weakness of existing national ties in the early modern era, thus recognizing the worldview of those Atlantic residents who migrated to or traded with people in England, Europe, Africa, the mainland British American colonies, and the Caribbean. That considerable numbers of people, rich and poor, travelled vast distances by sea throughout the Atlantic is remarkable and suggestive about the possible unity of an Atlantic community. Yet it is unclear whether they perceived themselves as travelling within one world or between worlds and whether they regularly saw the similarities in empires or regions outweighing the differences. Quite possibly, the Atlantic perspective simultaneously collapses real differences between nations and exaggerates unity. Was the Atlantic world comprised, in part, of rival empires that were mostly self-contained, except when they traded or smuggled from one another, fought each other, or exchanged people or pathogens?27 Implicit in Europeans’ understanding of empire building was the mercantilist vision of economic gains by one power leading ultimately to a weakening of the relative political-economic position of its rivals. By their nature, the tools of imperial extension, whether armies or charters, tried to define the limits of rival claims and thus built a protective wall around an ideal, nationalized imperial model.28 The age of exploration is depicted frequently in terms of this competitive spirit, yet as rival empires matured, they continued to compete for the allegiance of Amerindian nations, for access to valuable economic resources, including gold, fish, furs, and agricultural exports, and for the recruitment of free settlers, indentured servants, and African slaves to populate and to work their growing colonial communities. Leaders of nationalistic empires in competition

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with each other over New World territories opposed internationalism – if by this we mean cooperation or deliberate, meaningful exchange between rival European nations and peoples – but within an emerging empire, a multicultural and multiethnic perspective may have been a crucial ingredient. The extension of English imperial authority over new North American possessions required negotiation with and the incorporation of non-British settlers of varying degrees of familiarity, including most notably the Irish, Germans, and Africans, as well as indigenous populations, as new subjects or potentially hostile resident aliens. Consequently, an international and multi-ethnic viewpoint may have operated at times more readily within an empire than between empires. Such a perspective might be partly an Atlantic phenomenon, resulting from common experiences of exchange and travel within the basin, but it did not preclude the coexistence of strong nationalistic and imperial worldviews. Interestingly enough, to date few Atlantic studies have been truly international. There is assorted transnational evidence from commercial studies since all items of international trade by definition traverse borders. The tobacco and sugar trades had implications for European, African, and colonial economies, and the common shipping lanes contained an international assortment of vessels filled with people of many nationalities. Hancock’s study of Madeira wine is highly suggestive, although the product is an atypical Atlantic staple. The duration and significance of transnational interaction, as Hancock himself has urged, deserve further study.29 Having demonstrated that the Atlantic world exhibited multiple transatlantic and cross-cultural qualities, it remains to be seen whether there were significant and common enough interactions for contemporaries to have seen the Atlantic world as a truly transnational community. This collection of essays originated with the historical conference “The English Atlantics Revisited,” held 26–27 September 2003 at the University of Western Ontario. The conference celebrated the career of Ian K. Steele upon his retirement, and it afforded participants the opportunity to reflect on the current state of Atlantic history as well as on its future. The original conference schedule contained panels on the Political Economy of Empire, Maritime History, Amerindians and Captives, Military History, and Social History. These units persist as major current themes in colonial American and British Atlantic studies, but they also loosely reflect the phases of Steele’s scholarship to date. Political economy is the label that best suits Steele’s earliest work, including his dissertation/first monograph on the Board of Trade; The English Atlantic, his study of communications and trade, illuminated maritime issues;

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military themes as well as Amerindian history figured prominently and notably in his Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” and his Warpaths: Invasions of North America; and his editorial work on The Human Tradition in Colonial America and on The Human Tradition in the American Revolution fits squarely within social history. This anthology contains revised and in most cases expanded versions of the papers delivered at the conference, as well as a few additional essays that were not part of the original conference. A couple of conference participants have made substitutions. The contributors include both senior and junior scholars, friends, colleagues, and students of Ian Steele. Steele’s own oral presentation on his work-in-progress on captives is not reproduced here. The other noteworthy omissions are the oral comments delivered, as part of the conference panels, by Daniel Baugh, Regna Darnell, Richard Johnson, Kenneth Lockridge, and John Shy. In its own way, each of the six parts of this book illuminates various problems and issues in Atlantic history. Together, they treat a wide range of topics related to the English Atlantic, to past and present debates on Atlantic history, and to the continued coherence of its broad themes. Within each section, the chapters are arranged in approximate chronological order. Characteristic of Steele’s vision, as well as perhaps of the current state of the discipline, most of the essays illuminate features of the English or later British Atlantic, as opposed to the Atlantic World. Nonetheless, many of the pieces recognize important cross-cultural and even transnational interactions in addition to transatlantic comparisons. Part 1 elaborates the “Contexts” with two essays that deliberately focus on Steele’s contributions. Richard Johnson and John Shy each offer their views on how Steele’s scholarship has reshaped how historians interpret the British Atlantic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; these chapters, and part of John Murrin’s conclusion, are the only ones in the collection to address Steele’s legacy directly. Johnson moves through the “spaces” of Steele’s evolving scholarship and in so doing touches on major historiographical trends of the past several decades. Focusing more exclusively on military history, Shy offers an intriguing comparison of Steele and Prussian military theorist and historian Carl von Clausewitz. For those unfamiliar with Steele’s scholarship (a complete publication list, as well as a list of his graduate students, can be found in the appendixes), these two chapters provide an overview, but they also suggest a number of themes that can be traced in the chapters that follow them. Politics is featured prominently in part 2, which contains three chapters on English political officials: William Blathwayt, Francis Nicholson, and William Gooch. The selection of these three subjects of study – all elite white gentlemen in privileged political offices – may be reminiscent

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of the traditional view of empire as the extension of British imperial structures overseas, but these chapters show that the empire was not merely a formal structure, but an evolving entity consisting of individuals who created and controlled both the formal and informal reins of power. As described in detail by Barbara Murison, the very capable Blathwayt saw the empire from the vantage point of London and from various key administrative positions related to plantation business, most notably as the secretary at war and as secretary to the Lords of Trade. Individual chapters by Stacy Lorenz and Randy Dunn on Nicholson and Gooch, respectively, depict colonial American governors during different eras of the eighteenth century. Together, the three chapters reveal what it took to be successful in the politics of empire, how the empire worked, and how it could be worked by enterprising gentlemen. These chapters look beyond the structures of power to the operation of power. Consequently, they illuminate the limitations and interactions between British and colonial powers, the ways that they negotiated power between core and periphery, and the extent to which the politics of the empire were forged at the centre or the frontiers. The four essays in part 3, “The Maritime Atlantic,” do not all fit a conventional definition of maritime or naval studies. Here, the Atlantic assumes many roles, being both a facilitator in the sometimes peaceful trade of people and goods as well as the contested setting of important naval conflict. Overall, the authors emphasize, depending on the era under examination, the emergence or the firm integration of the English (later British) Empire – a unity forged by trade of various kinds with overseas colonies, by war with rival European powers, and by the mobility of subjects between distant parts of the empire. The increased need for ships for commercial and military purposes, in turn, affected the domestic English timber trade. Kennedy’s chapter challenges established wisdom concerning the origins of the English Atlantic and urges the inclusion of Bermuda in the first few decades of the seventeenth century. Dove encourages an evaluation of the North Atlantic and Hudson Bay, an area of interest to early Canadian historians but typically omitted by English Atlantic and colonial American scholars. Together, these essays reveal the place of these northern and southern “fringes” within the English Atlantic. Morrison’s treatment of the imperial navy and royal forests reveals the connectedness of local English timber markets to the seventeenth-century Atlantic economy, thus suggesting the cis-Atlantic significance of a local issue to the broader Atlantic community. Finally, Baugh provides a larger, transnational perspective by comparing the French and English maritime empires in his careful examination of the oceanographical and geographical settings in which sea power was employed.

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Part 4, “Frontiers: Amerindian and Military,” examines the frontiers of English- or European-settled colonial British America, particularly as they offered an arena of military conflict and interaction with Amerindians. These three essays assess the British Atlantic themes of crosscultural and transnational interaction. Campbell’s chapter on the Royal American Regiment, consisting of multinational members, illuminates the intertwined themes of transoceanic European migration, military service, and the process of settlement on the frontier. Amerindian, military, and diplomatic themes unite in Parmenter’s chapter, which reinterprets the operation of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) diplomacy. This examination of Haudenosaunee relations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs before the mid-eighteenth century does not reveal Haudenosaunee weakness and decline but points to complex, shifting, and entangled power relations for both the Haudenosaunee negotiators and the British commissioners. Hamilton’s piece examines the interface between the military and Amerindians as it evaluates British military dependence on Amerindians, traders, and French settlers. Together, these chapters depict different types of intercultural and transnational interaction on the frontier and its influence on matters of military, provincial, or imperial governance. The diversity of interactions suggests a world where both cooperation and conflict were commonplace, where frontier residents of varying ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities could at times accept, even benefit from, British dominance and imperial connections to other regions of the Atlantic world yet at other times fiercely reject and oppose British governance. The chapters on “Social History” in part 5 feature diverse social and international Atlantic themes of the eighteenth century. Norton’s essay on Samson Occom examines an extraordinary Mohegan who became an evangelical minister in the first Great Awakening and, in doing so, tested existing racial, religious, and national boundaries in colonial society and the empire. Lockridge’s chapter on the Swedishborn Hesselius brothers is a meticulous study of their evolving views on toleration in the Atlantic world, as revealed through their lives and their colonial paintings. When taken together, these essays illuminate important issues of assimilation and toleration in the British colonies and beyond. The last two chapters assess the impact of the American Revolution on socio-political trends and Atlantic mindsets concerning patriarchy and abolitionism. Rhoden examines whether select elite Virginian fathers perceived the American Revolution as a patriarchal crisis that intertwined transatlantic political struggles with parallel domestic and familial challenges to their authority. Kellow investigates diverse British antislavery uses of American Revolutionary values and themes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thereby

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depicting the ongoing and mutually reinforcing transatlantic exchange of ideas. Perhaps these last two chapters divert most from the Steele canon in taking on the American Revolution and its “countervailing trends” directly, yet they indicate the applicability of an Atlantic perspective in the Revolutionary era and the early nineteenth century. The concluding chapter by John Murrin is a revised version of the plenary comment that he delivered at the conference. Once again, this time in writing, he performs the difficult task of making sense of it all.

notes 1 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 273. 2 Steele also made this point explicitly in 1998, by writing “[t]he very notion that there was a clear dichotomy between the American environment and migrants’ cultural luggage discounts the continuing influence of English Atlantic communications, which continually reinforced the comparative advantage of British migrants, their descendants, and those who assimilated”; see Ian K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 70–95, esp. 82. 3 Other influential monographs, also published in 1986, that advanced (independently) a transatlantic scope include: Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1988), and his Voyagers to the West: A Passage on the Peopling of America on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Within a couple of years, others appeared, including most notably David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 On Andrews and the imperial school, see Richard R. Johnson, “Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial History,” William and Mary Quarterly (henceforth wmq) 3rd ser. 43 (1986): 519–41, esp. 529, 530. 5 David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 11–27 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11. For an interesting early-1990s analysis of

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7 8

9 10

11

12 13

14

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possible new frameworks to deal with massive historical data, see Jack P. Greene, “Interpretive Frameworks in American History,” wmq 3rd ser. 48 (1991): 515–30. Armitage, “Three Concepts,” 13; Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996), 19–44, esp. 21–4; Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169–82 at 171. Coclanis traces Atlantic history’s paternity primarily to the imperial tradition, material on the expansion of early modern Europe’s economy, the French Annaliste tradition, and the writings of Catholic intellectuals on the Atlantic community. Note that Bailyn’s “The Idea of Atlantic History” also appears in his Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, 3–56 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005). Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” 27–8. Most prominent among the publications by Charles McLean Andrews are The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–38), and The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924). Johnson, “Charles McLean Andrews,” 533–4. “Anglicization” is not a new expression in current Atlantic studies but dates back most notably to John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (PhD thesis, Yale University, 1966). Any comprehensive list of those modern historians would be a long one, but it would include Bernard Bailyn, David Hackett Fischer, Jack P. Greene, Edmund S. Morgan, and J.G.A. Pocock. Particularly suggestive is Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 311–36. Johnson, “Charles McLean Andrews,” 534–9. On tension between national history and Atlantic history, see Carole Shammas, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds, The Creation of the British Atlantic World, 1–16 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), esp. 1–3. Alison Games, “History without Borders: Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context,” Indiana Magazine of History 91 (1995): 159–78, esp. 160, 162, 166. Games, who notes that the imperial school reacted against “parochial national histories” (166), urges that an alternative to teaching US history from a world perspective is the incorporation of the Caribbean for comparative purposes. Armitage, “Three Concepts,” 15–26, quotation at 22. Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). On the shift in nomenclature from “colonial America” to “colonial British America,” see Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of

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19 20 21

22

23

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Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1093–114, esp. 1096, 1099, 1105. Johnson, “Charles McLean Andrews,” 539. Fred Anderson and Andrew R.L. Cayton, “The Problem of Fragmentation and the Prospects for Synthesis in Early American Social History,” WMQ 3rd ser. 50 (1993): 299–310 at 299, quotation at 300. Hancock has argued that post-1950s scholarship looked at empire from a “sociological perspective” that saw empire “more as a process than as a structure, and the connections that they found were typically social and human”; see David Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Invention of Madeira Wine,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998): 197–219 at 199. Likewise, Nicholas Canny perceptively argues that the scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s was “to an extent … the writing of the social history of the area that Andrews and his disciples had studied from the administrative, institutional, and trading perspectives”; see Canny, “Writing Atlantic History,” 1096. Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” 19. Bailyn, Peopling of British North America, 3. Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 811–32; Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). T.H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467–99; Breen addresses consumerism’s role in the American Revolution in his “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (1988), 73–104; see also his Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Although Coclanis notes that the Atlantic approach is “not merely trendy, but is clearly winning the day,” he recognizes a serious drawback in that it has been “reduced to little more than buzzword”; see Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten,” 170, 171, 175–9. He warns that the Atlantic perspective may overstate America’s effect on northwestern Europe and northwestern Europe’s place in the world and thus cautions against an emphasis on American developments before the mid-eighteenth century and against a neglect of the East. David Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation,” 198. The same point, with virtually the same language, is repeated in the first paragraph of Hancock, “The British Atlantic World: Co-ordination, Complexity, and The Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651–1815,” Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History, no. 2 (1999): http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/itin/ hancock.htm

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25 John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1970), esp. 79–104; John H. Elliott, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 3–13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Elliott as discussed in Canny, “Writing Atlantic History,” 1105, 1109. 26 Steele, “Exploding Colonial,” 78, 83. 27 Hancock offered a variation of this question on the first page of “The British Atlantic World,” when he wrote “‘Did the expansion of Europe create a common historical area along the Atlantic shores of Europe, Africa, South America, and North America?’ Or is it more fruitful to regard this area as a set of empires, mostly self-contained, except when they fought each other?” 28 Compare Bernard Bailyn, “On the Contours of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History, 59–111, esp. 59–63, 83–4. On charters, see Elizabeth Mancke, “Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World,” in Mancke and Shammas, eds, Creation of the British, 237–62. 29 Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation,” 197–219; Hancock, “The British Atlantic World,” 5, 10.

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1 Changing Spaces Reconstructing the Political Economy of Empire richard r. johnson

In 1984, in a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association, Ian K. Steele declared that the matter of empire, as embodied in what had come to be called the imperial perspective on early American history, was “alive and well, and living under various assumed names.”1 Even as he spoke, indeed, Ian was himself providing there in London, Ontario, one of the safe houses, along with the witness protection program, in which this fugitive concept, hunted (in the manner of Tom Paine’s Liberty) around the globe, was finding asylum. Nowadays, as the papers at this gathering showed, times have changed. Empire and the imperial perspective have come out of the closet in the lower forty-eight states, both for past and present. Books are written characterizing the United States as an empire, if one still in denial. Seminars are held in Washington, dc, on the tools and uses of empire, and imperial proconsuls are commissioned for foreign dependencies (indeed, one of the most recent, for Iraq, being a very model of a modern major general inasmuch as he majored in history and generalled in the army, although he did not last very long). We ponder anew what can and might be meant by “garrison government.” Now, to note this tenuous yet persistent thread of connection between empire past and present may seem a somewhat perverse way to begin this chapter, for it runs counter to a persistent concern of Ian’s work, which this volume justly honours. One of the great virtues of Ian’s magnificent corpus of scholarship has been its keen awareness of the distortions endemic in historical hindsight, the winnowing of the past to sustain and justify the main roads subsequently seen to be taken. He has been intent on recovering what contemporaries themselves can have

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perceived and experienced, on showing communities being formed rather than doomed to be disrupted, conflicts stalemated rather than triumphantly resolved. He has never assumed that, as the poet Carl Dennis recently put it, “the rebels who take the fort must carry the flag of the future in their knapsacks.”2 Rather, as Ian more delicately phrased it in his classic study of communication and community in the early-eighteenthcentury English Atlantic, we end at 1740 “to avoid preoccupation with the countervailing trend that later dominated.”3 Such obstinate clear-headedness may in part stem, one might argue, from his being endowed with atypical hindsight, one heightened by living, learning, and teaching (as is sometimes said about Mexico) so far from God and so close to the United States. Bernard Bailyn has noted how many of the most gifted exponents of the history of the early modern Atlantic world are those whose experiences and perspectives extend across national boundaries. He has also commented on the mental constraints imposed by teaching a single – usually one’s own – country’s history.4 It remains difficult to avoid the gravitational pull, the intellectual hegemony – as exerted by the development of the Republic – of sleeping so close to the elephant. As far back as 1912, Charles M. Andrews quite lost his cool in a letter to Frederick Jackson Turner – “an insult,” he snarled, “nothing short of criminal” – when Turner and his Harvard colleagues produced a guide to the study of American history that subsumed bibliographical references to early North America under the heading of “Genesis of the Union” and within the section given to US history from 1781 to 1865. It was to evade this kind of involuntary servitude that George Louis Beer, another imperial historian, stressed that his focus of interest was the fate of the British Empire, not the rise of the American nation.5 Armed with this perspective, Ian’s work has long guided – indeed, directed – our understanding of the formation of the first British Empire and its chequered career in early North America. Through some forty years, he has taken us with him across a succession of stages, or historical arenas, from each of which we have been enabled to see more deeply into the unfolding patterns of empire. Together, they compose what I would characterize as the changing spaces of Ian Steele (a passing homage to David Lodge’s classic tale of academics in motion), spaces that have shaped Ian’s and, hence, our vision, spaces stepping ever westward that have brought on stage a succession of different casts of characters.6 I want to explore these spaces in turn not only because they show the range of Ian’s scholarly achievement, but also because they show how we have come to endow empire itself, that protean and often pejorative term, with more complex meanings and implications. Should I finally seem to lapse into presentism and/or

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succumb to the history of the United States, I hope that this might be taken as an indication of the larger value of what Ian’s texts have inspired in the minds of others. I see the first space taking shape some forty years ago, as Ian journeyed to London, England, and worked on the doctoral thesis that became his first book. The prevailing vision of the formation of England’s – not yet Britain’s – empire was then at once grandiose and blinkered. Building on the work of such scholars as Beer and Andrews, it surveyed and plotted the whole span of colonial development. Yet it did so by looking outward from the centre, intent on charting the unfolding of London’s policies, whether in a spirit of measured admiration for the empire’s growth – taking up, as it were, the white scholar’s burden – or through more critical Fabian or Marxist lenses that discerned the beginnings of an imperialist exploitation of colonial dependencies. From whichever viewpoint, to the metropole belonged the credit or blame. We learned of institutional development and the crafting of mercantilistic regulation, of the careers of governors and other imperial officials. The years extending through the last half of the seventeenth century and into the next assumed especial significance, for they were, as David Armitage has recently reminded us, the time when the beliefs (if not yet the discipline) of political economy were emerging to shape the conceptualization and practice of empire, making commerce an affair of state and politics, in turn, the pursuit of business by other means.7 Ian began a lifelong engagement with these years; I would guess that he, like others before him, fell under the spell of the Aladdin’s cave of manuscript materials spread out before him in British archives and especially the Public Record Office. Yet he infused them with fresh insight, inspired not only by a knowledge of events in America, but also, it would seem, by the approach pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier in his studies of the structure of late-eighteenthcentury English political life. The Namierist approach downplayed the formulation of hard and fast policies at the centre by clearly defined political parties in favour of reconstructing, often through a process of collective biography, what they perceived as the unstable interplay of the forces of faction, patronage, connection, and selfinterest that dominated the processes of government – what might be described as a kind of soft-core prosopography. In this vein, Ian’s 1968 study of the work of the Board of Trade presented the board as “an awkward child of political expediency … A changing group of individuals rather than a bureaucratic institution.”8 It was securely based on the formal records of the board and on materials of the Public Record Office. It also looked beyond them to sift papers held

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in provincial archives, both English and American, that showed the interweaving of private and public interests, the factionalization of appointments, and the waning of the board’s prestige and influence as it lost its connections to executive power. Far from commanding events, the board was increasingly commanded by them as it responded to the shifting pressures exerted by war, commerce, piracy, lobbyists, office seekers, and colonial recalcitrance. This picture of the formation of empire – one shaped as much from the outside in as from the inside out, as well as by forces acting upon government rather than the reverse – leads us on to our second space, one through which, more than any other, Ian has exerted a commanding influence on subsequent scholarship: the sea, specifically an “English Atlantic” sea understood as the arena in which the community of empire took shape. The study of what has come to be called “Atlantic history” was already active, inspired by comparative study of the seaborne empires of the age of European expansion and by the rhetoric that accompanied forging of the transoceanic alliances of the twentieth century. Economic historians had charted the traffic in many of the great commodities of Atlantic commerce – bullion, sugar, tobacco, cod, and slaves – and had examined the factors that reduced transaction costs and reconfigured the terms of trade.9 There was talk of the formation of an Atlantic civilization. In the realm of geopolitics, Ian’s London supervisor, Gerald Graham, had written of the role of sea power in forming what he termed an “Empire of the North Atlantic” from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.10 Ian’s study, however, which appeared after more than a decade’s labour in 1986, reshaped the contours of debate in several important respects. From its opening pages, it made manifest the dominant influence of the North Atlantic itself. Its opening figure of the major ocean currents – widely reprinted and, surely, a staple visual aid in many other classrooms besides mine – drives home his accompanying argument about the ways that currents, winds, and climatic variations gave pattern and seasonal rhythm to transatlantic communication. The book is a true ekistical study, to adopt the term employed by students of ancient Mediterranean cultures, in that it shows how the characteristics of a particular space have shaped societal development.11 Policy plays a subordinate role in comparison with circumstance and private interest: in place of the traditional narrative organized around the interaction of governments, the focus is on the exchange of products, people, and information, on empire experienced rather than empire imposed. Simultaneously, however, Ian emphasizes contemporaries’ keen sense of their national identity: this is not just a history of how a particular space reshaped the English world, but also one of how that space itself was

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becoming anglicized, forming, in the words of Thomas Pownall, “a grand marine empire.”12 This was a space that united rather than divided: we must understand the eighteenth-century English Atlantic world as one of sea separated by land, not land by sea. It cost six times as much to send a letter – or a ton of goods – a few miles inland from Boston or New York as to send it across the ocean to London. Nor was this space’s influence static: building out of what began, Ian states, as “a simple enquiry into the nature of communications in the first British empire,” he provides an abundance of evidence drawn from the statistical reconstruction of ships’ voyages and the increasingly efficient transmission of news and official correspondence to show how – politically, socially, and economically – the English Atlantic was becoming a more integrated and efficiently articulated community during the years between 1675 and 1740.13 Far from the ocean serving America – or England or Europe – in the office of a moat, separating previously established and separately developing communities, it provided a literally fluid medium for continued intermingling and cultural cross-fertilization, laying foundations that would survive the political disruptions that followed. Throughout, the book is superbly researched, especially in contemporary newspapers and official records, painting a portrait rich in individual events and stories that are yet drawn together to form a quantitative and sophisticated analysis. Rather than eulogize the book further, let me assess what I judge to be its enduring influence and implications. The several elements of its portrait of the English Atlantic have led in different directions. Its depiction of the currents of transoceanic trade has provided a context for further studies of merchants, such as those by David Hancock, that are truly Atlantic in their bilateral and often transnational span. Ian himself had earlier provided an additional example in his edition of the early-eighteenth-century letterbook of Joseph Cruttenden, a Londoner trafficking in drugs and medicines to British America. Moving into the realm of the ties between commerce and politics, we have learned more of the role of the mercantile interest groups operating in the Atlantic arena and their lobbying at Whitehall.14 More generally, scholars have continued to build on the argument implicit throughout the book that the history of colonial British North America is much more than an aggregation of an introductory period of seventeenth-century settlement and a conclusion of late-eighteenthcentury revolution, together serving, as in the title of a popular text, as prelude to nation-time (i.e., that of the United States). Rather, we can now see the years from the late seventeenth century into the middle of the next as possessing a dynamic and importance of their own. Politically,

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as we have known for some time, they were a period in which previously semiautonomous settlements accommodated themselves to a closer association with London’s authority. Socially and demographically, too, they were a period of dramatic growth in British America partly because among its ongoing transatlantic passages were tides of multiethnic migrants, voluntary and involuntary, European and African. Ian does not make very much of these in his own writings, perhaps because they were, initially at least, less an intrinsic part of his English Atlantic, but they have been the subject of extensive investigation and quantification in the past two decades. More in direct descent from his work has been the further exploration of some of the political and cultural implications of the processes of community formation that he brought to light.15 One of his book’s great strengths was its documentation of the unfolding manysidedness of his Atlantic community: the founding and proliferation of newspapers in Boston and Philadelphia are matched against the same process in Jamaica – and, across the ocean, in Nottingham, in Dublin, and in Edinburgh. This has encouraged exploration of how an English empire was becoming British by transatlantic migration, but also by social and cultural cross-fertilization between England’s local, cisatlantic provinces and those that were more newly founded across the ocean. We find patterns in the transmission of models of gentility, modes of religious revivalism, and habits of the cultivation of the soil.16 For example – and this has considerable importance for the history of Canada well into the nineteenth century – we can now appreciate that, contrary to Dr Samuel Johnson’s slur, the best sight that an eighteenth-century Scotsman could see was not the high road to England but the ship taking him – or his writings, or his goods, or the students whom he had trained, or the tenants whom he had dispossessed – to America.17 A still larger perception grows out of this work: the degree to which empire in these years – once we define it in terms of commerce, communication, and cultural transmission rather than metropolitan control – was being created as much in the provinces and on the peripheries as at the metropolitan core. Ideologically, a “blue-water” empire of the seas could be conceptualized and celebrated on both sides of the English Atlantic as an empire of liberty, in self-righteous Protestant contrast to the notoriously papistical, authoritarian, and more generally land-based dominions of France and Spain.18 Pragmatically, colonists settling on the peripheries of empire looked to an often reluctant Crown for aid to sustain their rights and liberties as British subjects. To garble Dr Johnson yet again, some of the loudest yelps for an empire of liberty came from those who wanted their trade in slaves protected or sought London’s patronage and assistance in retaining new lands taken from the Amerindians.

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Now, Ian has never shown much deference to the emerging world of cultural studies – I fear he instinctively reaches for a scalping knife when he hears the term. Yet he has been keenly attuned to what I have termed the more pragmatic aspects of the formation of an imperial identity. In particular, he has repeatedly highlighted the eighteenthcentury emergence of elite groups within the American colonies, composed of leaders who derived much of their authority, substance, and status from their diverse connections to the metropolis but who might also sustain their power and reputation in the eyes of lesser colonial beings by standing in defence of local rights and privileges against what could be deemed potentially tyrannical imperial interference. These leaders, Ian has noted, “could serve themselves while claiming to serve both their neighbors and their monarch” – deans, as it were, within the imperial university.19 These elites, then, could be at once creators and beneficiaries, celebrants and critics of English Atlantic empire. Their role in its integration (and subsequent disintegration and regrouping) remains to be fully explored, although two unduly neglected studies – one (Marc Egnal’s A Mighty Empire) coming out of a neighbouring Ontario school and the other (Huw Bowen’s Elites, Enterprise, and the Making of the British Overseas Empire) coming from an English scholar of British India – build on Ian’s insights.20 Both take note of the construction of empire on its margins and of the ways that the imperial community had to be formed and celebrated before its fruits could be transmuted, as it were, into bones of contention. I emphasize these themes because they lead us directly to what I perceive as the third of Ian’s chosen spaces, that within the lands of North America. It is a space that resonates with changes taking place in the character of empire, for by the mideighteenth century, as scholars from the time of Beer and Andrews have noted, the first British Empire, like some prehistoric being, was evolving out of the ocean to become a more territorially based entity. Territory began to be collected and defended to deny it to other competing empires, be they French, Spanish, or Amerindian; land speculators pressed transmontane claims and sent out a young George Washington to experience his first defeat; and imperial officials were drawn into committing resources, seeking inland alliances, and planning the defence of interior zones of friction. The Atlantic remained at empire’s core but as a less dominant force in shaping policies and images for a realm now extending within North America and southern Asia.21 These experiences, as empire became literally less fluid and more finite, would eventually splinter the shared interests and assumptions held by British metropolitan and overseas elites – to the point of their reconfiguration as the bases of separate nationhoods.22 For several

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decades in mid-century, however, these elites pursued the work of empire in reasonably loyal harmony, united at least in finding common enemies; and it is around these shared ventures within an inland space of interimperial and interracial rivalry in North America that Ian has set much of his most recent work, and particularly his two fine books Betrayals and Warpaths. It is a space that he first traversed more than thirty years ago with his concise survey of the struggle for Canada, Guerillas and Grenadiers; and there are indications, in prefaces and presentations, that he was drawn back into it by a longstanding, and still ongoing, interest in the treatment of those who were themselves hostages of empire, namely those held as prisoners of its wars.23 Some years ago, John Murrin concluded a penetrating analysis of early American politics by noting the importance of war, that “foul threeletter word,” in shaping colonial North American development.24 Ian, I would judge, has come to agree – something of a journey down the road from assessing a world formed by interest-group politics, and then by commerce and communication, and now by border warfare. It is not an evolution, one hopes, that has grown out of the experiences of four decades of academic life at a seemingly peaceful university. Now, Ian’s work in military history – cold Steele, as it were – is a subject that is separately considered here. Yet we do need to consider this work’s impact and implications as they relate to our understanding of imperial development. Here, war was undeniably a formative force: one recent study of the Seven Years’ War – to Americans, the French and Indian War – has aptly characterized it a “crucible” for determining the “fate of empire.” Further, following the work of John Brewer, we can now see that war – and the mobilization of resources that it demanded – was a potent force in the processes of state formation in eighteenth-century Britain. From this perspective, empire and its war making have helped to make the nation-state as much as the other way around.25 Contemporaries then, and scholars since, debated the implications of imperial expansion, notably the larger effects of subjugating non-British peoples abroad and the threat thereby posed to limited government and traditional liberties at home. War, then, we have come to recognize, is too important a subject to be left to the military historians. In Ian’s hands, it has not focused on state formation or institutional change. He has not embraced the overstated thesis of Stephen Saunders Webb that English colonization was from the first shaped by a paramilitary tradition of “garrison government.”26 Rather, Ian places us under the gun, on the front lines, moving us a world away from an English Atlantic into a continent where a host of different nationalities and ethnicities compete to establish their dominion. It is through their conflict, not their coexistence, that

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we see into a world of shifting alliances, changing patterns of warfare, and contrasting cultural practices and expectations. Betrayals and Warpaths, it should be noted, are two different kinds of book. The first is a microcosmic study centred on the capture of Fort William Henry by the French and Indians in 1757, a gripping tale that is also a study of the clash of customs and attitudes about making war and about recording its history. The second is a sweeping analytical survey of the “invasions of North America” over two and a half centuries, one that follows – instead of, as in Betrayals, cutting across – the grain of history. Much more than Ian’s earlier work, however, both show the insights to be derived from comparative history, from seeing how different peoples – French and English, Iroquois and Ottawa, and (in Warpaths) Dutch and Spanish as well as Cherokee and Apalachee – practised war within the North American arena. Warpaths also provides comparison over time by contrasting what are in effect the phases of emerging empire within North America – from the first European establishments of beachhead “bases for invasion” in a world still dominated by inter-Amerindian conflict, through the early-eighteenthcentury intersections of European expansion, to the coming of modes of regular European warfare to North America after 1748. We are once more forming empire on its peripheries but now through the violent interplay of many peripheries. Throughout, conflict provides the historians’ laboratory: there is no room here for the self-delusive idealism reflected in the image of the Indian on the Massachusetts Bay Company seal, depicted as a child of the forest saying “come over and help us.” This is a world where all sides, rather than both sides, helped themselves by any means possible, for at the heart of Ian’s innovative blending of ethnohistory and military history in Warpaths is his emphasis that racial divisions were as yet by no means absolute: strategies for survival and prosperity transcended any such boundaries. Nor, in the wake of a long succession of transracial alliances, were Europeans predestined to be conquerors and Amerindians the victims: we end in 1765 with a stalemate, an accommodation. Once again, we should not read what was to come back into what actually occurred. We have come some distance from the genteel corridors of Whitehall, from an empire crafted by pens and paper to ones being written in blood and violence; and it may be that Ian’s further exploration of the treatment of prisoners of war will place more emphasis on the diplomatic negotiation, commercial trading, and personal strategies and shapeshifting that also, as he would acknowledge, played significant roles in the formation of America’s inland empires. There may be room for assessment of what Richard White calls the “creative misunderstandings” in frontier relationships that produced accommodation

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and synthesis along with conflict.27 What endures, however, is the value of assessing the formation of empires by, as it were, rubbing them one against another, sparking historical understanding through studying their friction. Few scholars have attempted comparative assessments of early modern empires, and those who have, like Anthony Pagden, James Muldoon, and Patricia Seed, adopt a legal and conceptual approach.28 Ian has given us an angle of vision and investigation that is literally better grounded – in land, in human actions, and in events. I have traced here what I perceive as Ian’s changing spaces, different rooms offering different horizons but all illuminated for us by his trenchant gaze. All, too, as I have noted, now have other scholars at work in them. Their number and range are evident in four multiauthored collaborative volumes published in just the last several years: The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800; Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820; and the first two volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire.29 The titles themselves reveal overlapping but by no means identical fields of investigation: England’s (now seen as Britain’s) Atlantic; the varieties of empire across the American hemisphere; and the emergence of a global British Empire. A significant proportion of the contributors have studied in one of two academic centres for the study of the early modern Atlantic world: Bernard Bailyn’s Harvard and Jack Greene’s Johns Hopkins, core workshops whose graduates are now colonizing the peripheries of academe. Empire, as I noted at the outset, is now very much out of the closet and advancing shod in ivy-league boots. True, the term has taken on a spectrum of meaning far beyond what any eighteenth-century political economist might have imagined: empire is studied not just as a geopolitical entity, but also as a mode of dominance and as a matrix for the study of community, culture, consumption, and even the great witching triad of gender, race, and class. Just as the quest for empire is seen to have shaped the metropolitan state, so we are now being told how discovering and defining the alien “other” has served to define the self in terms of patterns of taste, consumption, and the incorporation of the exotic. We echo what the Roman poet predicted: Greece, in being conquered, herself acculturates the conqueror. Titles such as Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest tenderize and genderize the body politic in ways unknown to even the most fevered dreams of Charles McLean Andrews.30 Ian would, I think, disclaim any parentage for a number of these offspring. Rather too many fly free of the discipline of archival support – chevaliers sans peur and sans recherches. Others remain all too concerned to expose the sins of the past to expatiate the failings of the present. Yet many draw their virtues from the insights and contexts

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that he has set up, and they demonstrate the value that scholars now find in using the lens of empire to explore early American history and its transnational context. This value, moreover, can reach further than we realize – for, in concluding, I should like to float some more personal thoughts about how this work, and Ian’s changing spaces, open the way to a larger reassessment of North America’s history, particularly as it returns to focus more closely on the theme of the political economy of empire. As I noted in opening this chapter, most historians of early America have shied away from venturing beyond the late eighteenth century for fear of finding themselves and their subject tied to the chariot wheels of subsequent post-Revolutionary national histories, be they of the United States or Canada. But I think that these historians are being too apprehensive – indeed, too modest – for, in the context of the study of empire, I would suggest, the American Revolution now seems less a terminus and new beginning than a partition and transmutation, in which a still youthful empire divides into empires differently defined and destined. The continuities become as significant as the disjunctures. In part, this stems from our fresh understanding of the “old” empire, one that is less the product of a centralized hegemonic government ruling dependent states than an assemblage of kingdoms and colonies – multiple monarchies within a composite state – and one whose governance, as Ian has recently remarked, “was much more interactive than previously suspected.”31 Now, this perception can be taken too far, and Ian has justly criticized its manipulation to justify colonial arguments for resistance to imperial authority.32 Still, I think – I hope – that he would acknowledge that the debate over the nature of empire in the late eighteenth century was a real one that served both to reevaluate its meaning and to sustain its legitimacy (and many of its institutions) as ongoing political goals. In sustaining this continuity, Ian’s colonial elites reemerged as, in the United States, governing republican elites, if ones with a broader political base in a more formally defined white, male electorate. Thomas Jefferson would envision “an empire for liberty” in language strangely reminiscent of Britain’s mid-eighteenth-century patriotic writers, although one that was now a grand territorial empire deriving its energizing political virtue not from navigating blue salt water but from its yeomen’s cultivation of the soil.33 Charles Andrews, for his part, would get some satisfaction in seeing how we can now stand Frederick Jackson Turner on his head by perceiving the western expansion that Turner considered a wellspring of democratic localism as, in fact, the continued construction of a confederated empire on its peripheries. In this process, the United States’ experience departed early from that of its northern neighbour, driven forward (as John Murrin has noted) by the sanctification of a successful

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war of independence and the writing of the federal constitution of 1787 as the twin foundations of a national identity.34 In Canada, imperial formation seems to have responded to such different forces as internal frictions, the proximity of the United States, and the impact of a new and massive British immigration.35 Each evolved its own political and ideological solutions for articulating the relationship between metropolitan and provincial authority. There are, of course, abundant opportunities for comparative analysis here, ones still not fully pursued. This might best be done, I suggest, not so much at what comes to be called the federal level but in terms of comparing the formation of the units of the composite states emerging, namely the states and provinces that antedated and then constituted their respective federations. We need to look at the processes not just of state formation, but also of states formation, especially those involving allocation of resources, interweaving of public and private interests, and formation of beliefs and practices pertaining to the functioning and purposes of government. Throughout, we should call upon the insights gained from studying the early modern empire, taking it both as a baseline for subsequent development and as a guide to the kinds of questions that we should be asking. It is missionary work, it questions American exceptionalism, and it tends to subordinate, for example, a US national history to the dictates of early American history; but we need to tame the US elephant, particularly as we see a territorial empire expand not just into a marine empire, but also into a global, aerial empire, with new subject peoples and with war making emerging as a terrifying amalgam of video game and spectator sport. I have drifted off into the wild blue yonder in several senses of the phrase, but Ian himself, I have suggested, has moved through a succession of spaces. True, he has retained a surer and more disciplined grounding in the materials of the past, along with a trenchant suspicion of unbounded speculation. My concluding remarks, nonetheless, are of his lineage, for they have grown out of the imagination, industry, and relentless curiosity that he has brought to the study of early America, especially to our understanding of empire and of what we are now beginning, under his tutelage, to see as its value and relevance for the study of the whole span of North American history.

notes 1 Ian K. Steele, “‘Beyond the Imperial School,’ or The Significance of the Atlantic Ocean in Early American History,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, December 1984, 1.

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2 Carl Dennis, Practical Gods (New York: Penguin Poets, 2001), 10. 3 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 273, ix. 4 Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996): 19–44 at 41. 5 Charles M. Andrews to Frederick Jackson Turner, 13 Oct. 1912, Turner Collection, Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino; George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 (New York: Macmillan, 1907), v. 6 David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). 7 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 6. 8 Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 3, xiii. 9 Much of this literature is summarized and examined in the chapters by Douglass C. North, Russell R. Menard, and Jacob M. Price in James D. Tracy, The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 10 Gerald S. Graham, Empire of the North Atlantic: The Maritime Struggle for North America (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1950). 11 See, for example, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (London: Hutchinson, 1968). 12 Thomas Pownall, quoted in Daniel Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a grand marine empire,’” in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, 185–223 (London: Routledge, 1994), 207. 13 Steele, English Atlantic, vii. See also Ian K. Steele, “Moat Theories and the English Atlantic, 1675 to 1740,” in Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1978, 18–33 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1979). 14 Ian K. Steele, Atlantic Merchant-Apothecary: Letters of Joseph Cruttenden, 1710– 1717 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992). 15 Much of this work is noted in Ian K. Steele, “Empire of Migrants and Consumers: Some Current Atlantic Approaches to the History of Colonial Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 489–512; and Richard R. Johnson, “Empire,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America, 107–13 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 16 See, for example, Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); H.V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise, and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688–1775 (London: Macmillan, 1996),

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ch. 7; and Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Strangers in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See, for example, Richard Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten, eds, Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); and Ned Landsman, ed., Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, pa: Bucknell University Press, 2001). See, for example, Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Steele, English Atlantic, 278; also Ian K. Steele, “The Empire and Provincial Elites,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds, The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution, 2–32 (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 18–19. Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Bowen, Elites, Enterprise. See also Michael J. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 93–112 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See, for example, P.J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15 (1987): 105–22; and “Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: [Part] I, Reshaping the Empire,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 8 (1998): 1–18. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” 109–11. Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1513–1765 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ian K. Steele, Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle for Canada, 1689–1760 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969). John M. Murrin, “Political Development,” in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, 408–56 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 446. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989); and the essays in Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War. Ian K. Steele, “Thin Red Lines: Governors of England’s Empire before 1681,” Reviews in American History 8, no. 3 (1980): 318–22; Ian K. Steele, “Governors or Generals? A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 46 (1989): 304–14. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x.

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28 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500 to c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A notable, and magisterial, exception is J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 29 Armitage and Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World; Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002); William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny; vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99). 30 Horace, Epistles 2.1.156; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 31 Ian K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 70–95 at 78. For the concept of multiple or composite monarchies, see J.H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 48–71; J.G.A. Pocock, “Empire, State, and Confederation: The War of American Independence as a Crisis in Multiple Monarchy,” in John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, 318–48 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Jack P. Greene, “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Empire,” in Daniels and Kennedy, eds, Negotiated Empires, 267–82. 32 Ian K. Steele, “British Parliament and the Atlantic Colonies to 1760: New Approaches to Enduring Questions,” in Philip Lawson, ed., Parliament and the Atlantic Empire, 29–46 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 33 Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 2, 53–79. 34 John M. Murrin, “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds, Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and National Identity, 333–48 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 347. 35 See, for example, Phillip Buckner, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association n.s. 4 (1993): 3–32.

2 Ian K. Steele as Military Historian john shy

When invited to take part in the conference occasioning the present anthology, I had been working exclusively on a long-neglected project far removed from North American history. The aim of this project is to produce an English edition of the last book written by Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian military theorist. Part of the project’s appeal is that, in Clausewitz’s book, theory is in the background, the focus being on a single historical episode; in other words, it is more or less “straight” military history. The book, translated into French but never into English, analyzes Napoleon Bonaparte’s first military campaign as a commander in the field, the remarkable campaign that launched his amazing career, which was conducted in northern Italy from 1796 to 1797 – that is, just when, across the Atlantic, George Washington was ending his own equally amazing public career. At the time, my mind was wrapped around the performances of young Bonaparte as a commander and of the mature Clausewitz as a military historian, both of which are entangled in the complexities of the German language, and I puzzled over how to proceed. What possible relevance could the premier theorist of war – whose German-language text slices and dices every move of large French and Austrian armies in their year-long bloody dance down the Po Valley and up into the eastern Alps – have for the history of North America as it appears in the work of Professor Steele? Thinking about this question, I saw that what had impressed me for more than thirty years about Steele’s touch in dealing with the subject of war – a touch that is both original and satisfying – has a good deal to do with what I was seeing in Clausewitz’s text as well as with what may be called the canonical form of military history. So taking Clausewitz the historian as a baseline, I offer in this chapter a critical appreciation of Steele as military historian, or perhaps more accurately as historian

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of war. Four of his books are the basis of this critique: Guerillas and Grenadiers (1969), The English Atlantic (1986), Betrayals (1990), and Warpaths (1994). I begin with the baseline: Clausewitz and the canonical mode of doing military history. The canonical mode is as notorious as it is popular – a history of warfare that narrows its focus to military commanders and battles, paying slight if any attention to all other elements of the wartime situation while imposing a strong narrative line on the course of events. This kind of military history seems to function mainly as entertainment, something like tales of adventure and murder mysteries. John Keegan, in the introductory chapter of his masterpiece, Face of Battle, argues that the inescapable model for this canonical form is Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, written to glorify himself. And it is hard to escape the canonical mode because it is what the audience expects. In some respects, Clausewitz’s text observes the canon. His focus is tightly on young Bonaparte and on his older counterparts on the Austrian side, with successive battles fought in the course of a year providing the structure of the book; his chief interest is in warfare and how it might be managed. The author also tends to take for granted that armies and the governments deploying them can be treated as unitary actors. But in important respects Clausewitz the historian deviated sharply from the canon, and this deviation is clearest when his work is laid alongside that of his rival theorist of war, Henri Jomini. Jomini was also a prolific military historian in the grand narrative tradition, and his books were a major source of information for Clausewitz himself. Even today the works of Jomini, completed in the early nineteenth century, are the starting point for any study of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As a historian, Jomini conformed to the canon by making dramatic narrative his first priority. Clausewitz used the information published by Jomini, who had ended his career as a general in the Russian army, a military consultant to the Czar, living comfortably and well connected in Paris, with better access than poor Clausewitz in Berlin to archives and first-hand witnesses. But Clausewitz never lets narrative, the dramatic story loved by readers of military history, dominate his work. Instead, he frequently interrupts the story to ask and answer questions – about inadequate or dubious evidence, about how best to explain what was happening in the narrative, about alternative possibilities. Whereas Jomini would usually slide by some anomaly in his story, such as why a brigade failed to move a short distance in a few critical hours, Clausewitz stops to worry such questions until he finds the best available answer. Moreover, as befits a theorist who preached that war is a

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continuation of politics by violent means, he gives more attention to the wider political context of warfare, to what was happening in Paris, Vienna, and the many small states of northern Italy. Although he pays scant attention to the inhabitants of northern Italy, where this war was happening, he does not ignore them. Liberated from Austrian domination by Bonaparte’s army, which brought the French Revolution in its wake, Italians were not always duly grateful when the French army imposed heavy requisitions on the wealthy and the peasants. The threat of prison was effective in making the rich cooperate, and when peasants violently resisted French impositions (as they did several times), sacking and burning a village, plus a few summary executions, effectively encouraged other peasants to supply their quota of food and livestock. Clausewitz notes all this in passing but does not dwell on the problem unless significant numbers of French troops were diverted from war against the Austrians in order to counter popular insurgency, which rarely happened. One notable exception occurred when Bonaparte contemplated moving northward into the Austrian Tyrol, where peasant resistance would be fierce, continuous, and dangerous to French operations. These differences between Clausewitz and his chief contemporary and critic, Jomini, in their ways of doing military history are striking, and Clausewitz paid a price, albeit posthumously, for his deviation from the canon. By meeting the expectations of his audience, Jomini the military historian was an international celebrity, and his theoretical work was equally well known and regarded. In contrast, almost no one had heard of Clausewitz until almost fifty years after his death, and only then because Prussia had used warfare to unite Germany and had done it so decisively that military opinion swung suddenly toward the presumptive theoretical genius behind German victory. But his historical studies, which he regarded as the only rational basis for theory, have remained generally neglected and mostly untranslated. As far as I know, Ian has very little interest either in employing theory or in extracting it from his highly empirical historical work. If his work is informed by theory, it is buried so deeply that I am unable to detect, much less describe, it. But in other respects, Steele’s historical treatment of war has much in common with Clausewitz’s. Not only do both authors exemplify a strong attachment to the empirical method, but they also share a mode of operation, perhaps better called a temperament. They insistently interrupt their stories to ask questions. Both sacrifice the dramatic narrative, with its satisfying (and often spurious) coherence, in favour of a felt need to get at the best possible approximation of what happened and why. Today, this sounds naive, and for authors, publishers, and readers of the standard version of military history,

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it has always been so. Most of the people who buy these books want Caesar, not Thucydides – vicarious excitement, not academic discussion. A case in point is the young Ian Steele’s first excursion into the history of war in 1969: a book of 134 pages of text entitled Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle for Canada, 1689–1760. It was one of a series of short books in Ryerson Press’s Frontenac Series, which was clearly aimed at students and was designed to help them understand the need to question traditional ways of understanding the Canadian national past. Perhaps it sold well as supplementary reading in university courses in Canadian history, but as far as I can tell it attracted almost no notice in the academic world. My university library does not own a copy, and among the other great research libraries of the Big Ten, I could find copies only at Iowa, Northwestern, and Wisconsin. Nor could I find reviews in the usual journals, either in Canada or the United States. No doubt I missed something, but the book seems to have fallen victim to the library and editorial policies of not acquiring or reviewing “textbooks” – which is really too bad. I cannot recall when or how I acquired my own copy. Having coauthored a little book a few years earlier with “guerrillas” in its title, I do recall being irritated by his spelling that key noun in the title with a single “r” (a usage that I have since learned is French). Once past the title page, irritation turned quickly to admiration, and a recent rereading has only reinforced this admiration. Not surprisingly for such a book, his notes cite standard secondary works and well-known published sources, and his chief target is Francis Parkman’s version of the origins of modern Canada, which Parkman cast as the conquest of feudalism by all the progressive features brought into European life by the Renaissance, epitomized by the confrontation on the Plains of Abraham in September 1759 of forces led by General James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, the one a middle-class and reform-minded officer, the other a rigid and aristocratic conservative. Parkman, of course, is a fairly soft target. But what still impresses is how readily Steele’s little book went beyond easy revisionism to sharp analysis of eighteenthcentury realities. European wars, for example, were not about “murderous battles” but about the shape of the peace to follow, and they were fought “to obtain a favourable settlement of dispute, not to destroy a religion or an ideology,” often with captured fortresses as bargaining chips.1 But wars fought by American Indians were different, drawing their Canadian, American colonial, British, and French allies into another kind of war, the “guerilla” warfare of the title. The ensuing mixture of two fundamentally different types of warfare, he advises his readers, was an “explosive” and “confusing” process – as it still is today – and we are told that observing this mixture over time will be the

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main theme of the book. A few lines later, he may have sowed some confusion of his own with his warning to students that, in tracing what led to the Anglo-American conquest of New France, questioning answers is at least as important as answering questions. I cannot speak for the students, but at the end of the introduction, I knew that I was reading a little book by a very smart historian. Steele ably synthesized what thirty-four years ago was the revisionist critique of the Parkman version and now is fairly standard, but he did it in a sharply analytical, quite original way. For example, on the notorious disunity of the vastly more populous English colonies in their struggle against New France – a theme still dear to historians of early North America – he asks why anyone would expect anything else: “disunity in English America should be a presumption, not an accusation.”2 And at the end of the book, in a statement that could still start a good argument, he concludes that British victory and the fall of Canada “may have had important cultural consequences, but … not cultural causes.”3 Very bold, and Clausewitz, I am sure, would have liked it. Zingers like these two are sprinkled throughout the book, interrupting the narrative flow and forcing the reader to stop and think. The English Atlantic, 1675–1740 (1986) may seem to those who know it a surprising choice for an appreciation of Steele’s work in military history. The book, Steele tells us, was begun as an “inquiry into the nature of communications in the first British Empire, just an elementary question or two to be solved before proceeding to something more general and supposedly more significant,”4 and in this sense the text seems more closely linked to his very first book, his dissertation study of the Board of Trade in early-eighteenth-century colonial administration. A critic might say that Guerillas and Grenadiers had given inadequate attention to the maritime dynamic of the fight within and for North America and, in turn, might guess that the later book would rectify this fault. But The English Atlantic is not naval history: it is a book about the more or less peaceful transatlantic movement of ships whose design and crewing were intended to carry cargo, people, and correspondence as economically as possible; it is not about great fleets of large warships heavily laden with cannon, ammunition, and stores, packed with sailors to work them and to man their weapons under the most extreme conditions, ships whose mission often required braving the worst weather and enduring very long voyages. The story of merchantmen and packets plying Steele’s North Atlantic seems to have little in common with the history of war, even with naval history. But his imaginative, original, yet highly concrete reconstruction of the movement of tangible objects and information in real time (not time as a social construction) over real space (not imagined space) speaks directly

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and conceptually to a fundamental problem of all warfare: the physical movement of armed forces, and of the information directing their movements, in real time and space. Military historians mention this problem only when it crops up and rarely in a more general way. Most of them give less attention to the topography of operational space than Steele gives to the prevailing movement of wind and water within the North Atlantic basin. In short, the book is a creative and stimulating attack on a central issue of military history, a book whose explanatory sections are also very sensitive to the effects of war. Gains in speed and frequency achieved under the impulse of the War of the Spanish Succession were largely sustained after peace broke out in 1713. In this sense, military historians can find in The English Atlantic a model for thinking outside their canon. Betrayals (1990) appears to be completely unlike The English Atlantic, as though done by a different historian. It is a close, detailed account of one notorious episode of the Seven Years’ War in North America – the siege and capture of Fort William Henry, at the southern end of Lake George, in August 1757 by Indian, Canadian, and French forces under Montcalm – as well as an account of what happened after the surrender of the fort. Many readers will be familiar with James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Last of the Mohicans, based on this episode, and many more will have seen one of the five movies of the same title, the last in 1992. I would bet that not so many readers have enountered Ian Steele’s book – partly, I suspect, because it looks so much like the canonical form of shoot-’em-up military history. Steele begins and ends Betrayals with historiography, introducing what he calls the “depressingly popular” version of the Fort William Henry “massacre” and describing how in the nineteenth century, it became part of the “usable past” invoked to justify treatment of North American Indians.5 Steele, the old-fashioned empiricist, simply wants to set the record straight; but he opens his account with a neat piece of trendy, microcosmic socio-cultural history by relating the story of Susannah and James Johnson and their family, captured in an Abenaki raid three years before the Fort William Henry episode, revealing what happened to all of them as the story unfolds. He moves on to a carefully researched account of the origins of the fort and of the plan to attack it within the wider context of the climactic point in the long Anglo-French fight for North America, a moment when European forces were transforming the nature of the struggle yet were themselves deformed by the struggle’s human and physical environment. His focus is very much on the Indians who took part in the 1757 campaign, not in order to excuse or defend but to understand. After two years of British failure and French victory, thousands of Indians, eager

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to take part in a prospective victory, poured into the French camp in 1757 – not just the well-known Indians in and around the St Lawrence Valley, but also Indians from the upper Great Lakes and beyond, Indians with whom the French had at best tenuous ties of language, experience, and influence. This literal cloud of Indian allies, by depriving the British and American garrison of information, supplies, and reinforcements, virtually ensured the capture of Fort William Henry by the professional soldiers from France, but just as certainly these Indian allies could not be controlled by the French commander in the aftermath of the fort’s capitulation. Promised the right to march the fifteen miles southward to their own lines, the defeated Anglo-American garrison was mugged, some of its number scalped, some of them killed, and many others taken captive. When the marauding Indians saw that Montcalm was willing to use his own soldiers to keep them from what they had come for – the trophies of victorious war – most of them left in disgust, never to return in the campaigns to follow, the campaigns that would seal the fate of New France. Almost nine-tenths of the defeated garrison survived and made it back to Fort Edward; their moment of sheer terror was relatively brief. Steele traces the alleged victims, by name where evidence survives, and concludes that among the fewer than 2,500 people – soldiers and camp followers – who surrendered, 268 never came back. Of these 268, at least 69 (but no more than 185) were killed in the actual “massacre.” Most of those captured were redeemed by French authorities and repatriated. Steele makes no attempt to mitigate the horror of the incident, nor does he apologize for Indian behaviour. When an Ottawa kills, cooks, and eats a captive, Steele simply recounts the event, saying only that it was unusual. Steele had already taught his readers that most Indians knew by 1757 that prisoners had great monetary value and thus that killing and eating one made little sense, even to other Indians. For those with an understandable aversion to these details of violence and terror, I strongly recommend the concluding, historiographical chapter in Betrayals. It is a fascinating exploration of how memoirists, novelists, and even some distinguished historians have dealt with this incident. For example, George Bancroft relied heavily on French sources to minimize the massacre and to blame the victims; Francis Parkman simply invented parts of his account, blaming the Indians and exonerating everyone else, concluding with an imagined scene of wolves feasting on the dead; the otherwise excellent French Canadian historian Guy Frégault simply ignored the massacre; and in the seventh volume of his magisterial history of The British Empire before the American Revolution, Lawrence Henry Gipson concluded his unexceptional chapter on the fall of Fort William Henry by saying that the

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victims numbered “not less than two hundred and may have greatly exceeded that number,” but he cited no evidence. Looking backward from 1994, when Warpaths: Invasions of North America was published, we can see a progression that Ian himself might not fully accept. The insistently questioning mode of inquiry was already evident in 1969 in his short survey for students, Guerillas and Grenadiers, which looks like a preliminary rough sketch for the most recent book. The English Atlantic (1986) is a work of impressive scope and originality, establishing a picture of a great web of transatlantic communications, a web that thickened from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries – not gradually but in bursts triggered by the alternating impulse of war and peace. The wonderful collection of documents in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial is the raw material for most of the account and argument developed in The English Atlantic, but only the author’s critical imagination and technique could have drawn such an account from these documents.6 Given its highly specific subject, Betrayals (1990) may seem a deviation for a historian accustomed to working on the wider canvas of North American and British imperial history, but it offers a well-developed understanding of how to incorporate the story of American Indians with the story of European colonization and imperial conflict. This achievement, managed without condescending either to the Indians or to political correctness, suggested a new idea: that of combining the very active field of American ethnohistory with the old stories of imperial conflict in a book with an even broader sweep than The English Atlantic, a new book that would trace the transformation of human relations in North America from 1513 to 1765, a transformation whose nexus was armed force but whose processes were far more complex than any simplistic notion of the European invasion and conquest of America. Warpaths is such a book. Opening with a brief account of early Spanish attempts to invade and conquer the Southeast, as Mexico and Peru had been conquered, Warpaths shifts to a vertigo-inducing narrative of five European beachheads in North America. By incorporating all that we have learned from the intense interest in what Steele decides to call the Amerindian people living east of the Mississippi, he emphasizes European ineptitude, weakness, and frustration in the first bold attempts to invade the northern half of the New World. But then at San Agustin, Jamestown, Quebec, Plymouth, and Albany, we see little lodgements, tiny in scale but durable over time, sustained only by external events and by their own pragmatic accommodation to geography and their human environment. So it was for the Spanish in Florida, the English at Jamestown, the French at Quebec, the English again at Plymouth (those hapless Pilgrims who thought that they were headed for

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Virginia), and the Dutch at Albany – fortified beachheads that somehow survived and even thrived, each with a different specific story and pattern of relations with its American neighbours. The outcome in each case depended on events happening so far over the horizon, and so beyond any notion of direct human control, that they escape even the Clausewitzian concept of strategy. But these beachhead stories do conform very well to the emphasis that Clausewitz placed on contingency and chance in the realm of war. Although Steele’s remarkable revisions of old stories attach great weight to the role of the Amerindians, which is what gives them their stimulating originality, his narrative retains the viewpoint of the European invaders – Myles Standish, John Smith, Samuel Champlain, and the rest –- the aggressive, clever, ruthless, and dogged (despite setbacks) cultural ancestors of Bonaparte. Admire him or loathe him, Napoleon is the hero who has fed the imagination of leaders, soldiers, and peoples for the past two centuries. From the year 1687 onward, Warpaths assumes the more familiar form of Guerillas and Grenadiers but with greater emphasis on the tentative, indecisive quality of the conflict among the Spanish, French, and British and on the ways that Europeans and Indians exploited each other, skilfully or clumsily, to pursue their own intramural goals. The early tentativeness of the European fight ended when the Great Powers across the water decided to Europeanize the conflict in North America, not only exporting their troops and their money – some of it spent to purchase Indian allies – but also exporting their peculiar concept of “war” that ends in negotiation and agreement, the concept of limited war that in 1763 made possible a final resolution of the imperial struggle for North America. In the immediate aftermath of that resolution, the Indians of eastern North America, left alone to face the Anglo-American victors, fought them to a standstill. So far, my promised critical appreciation of Ian Steele’s work as military historian has been unvarnished appreciation without much criticism. One of the more perceptive and knowledgeable reviewers of Warpaths quotes the following passage from the book: “European invasions of North America were not automatically a disastrous parade of irresistible disease, alluring consumerism, and overwhelming martial superiority.”7 The reviewer then counters that given their advantages it was “virtually certain … Europeans would establish a permanent home in America … Whatever happened in the short run [i.e., Steele’s subject] could not gainsay what was likely to occur in the long run.” A short answer to the reviewer might be that in the long run everyone is dead. A longer answer suggests that if the details of what exactly happened over the course of about 250 years are not very interesting or important because we all know how it turned out, then

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history itself hardly seems worth doing, especially the history of war, because we all know who won before we start. To return to the reviewer and cruelly abridge one of his sentences, “Steele’s laudable desire to tell the full story … seems overdrawn.”8 The reviewer may object that I misrepresent by elision exactly what he said in the quoted sentence, but these words accurately convey the querulous tone of an otherwise favourable review. What is it about some historical subjects – North American Indians, perhaps war, too, although not revolution – that hindsight induces a kind of ahistorical deadness of interest and sensibility, especially about the details of what happened and why? To deviate wildly from my mandate for a moment, I suspect that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 has already begun to induce a comparable deadness, a sense that only fools really believed that the Soviet Union was both very strong and very dangerous. Soviet collapse was inevitable, so why worry about the details? To consider another level of criticism of Warpaths, and by extension Steele’s way of doing the history of war, let me share a story: Not long after the publication of the book in 1994, I was asked to take a small part in a workshop being conducted for a group of rural high school history teachers in western Pennsylvania. The idea of the sponsored workshop was to deepen their knowledge of aspects of American and Pennsylvania history that could be applied in their own teaching. My own assignment was the colonial wars, and I was invited to assign a fair amount of appropriate reading. In my enthusiasm for what Steele had done, I assigned Warpaths, and I also put Francis Parkman on library reserve. Students were asked to read both. What I expected was that the sophistication of Steele would facilitate a stimulating discussion of Parkman’s viewpoint and shortcomings. But what actually emerged from this educated, mature, fairly well-motivated group of history teachers was a resounding popularity contest, and I am obliged to report that our friend Professor Steele lost the contest. When the students were asked why they preferred Parkman, the response was that he told a good story – a little flowery perhaps, but that’s how they wrote back then. Steele’s story was unclear, difficult to follow as he insisted on forcing the reader to think about questions, talking about Indian tribes who had different characteristics, about leaders whose names had to be kept straight, about extraneous factors like economics and religion, about battles that often failed to reach any clear-cut decision, and doing all this with a viewpoint so clinical that he rarely denounced even the worst atrocities. Parkman was a pleasure, but Steele was tough going, maybe all right for a graduate seminar but not for ordinary readers, even high school teachers. Reluctantly, I concede their point. The originality of what Steele has done in Warpaths, and much of its value, is in its spiky complexity. He is

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not telling a simple story, woven around a coherent theme. It is rather a heroic attempt to recapture the reality of about 250 years of violent interaction among people in eastern North America and to do it in about the same number of printed pages. Warpaths demands that the reader pay attention and work carefully with the author to grasp this reality. On the matter of spiky realism versus seductive narrative, there is little question where Steele stands. Like Clausewitz, he will not sacrifice analytical rigour to the desire for vicarious excitement. Steele himself raises this issue, tactfully, in his introduction to the forum of reviews – published in the Canadian Journal of History in 2000 – of Fred Anderson’s wonderful book Crucible of War. Anderson’s retelling of the story of the Seven Years’ War in North America, in Steele’s words, “offers hope, and cautions, to those who want professional historians to write careful history that is accessible to a larger audience who enjoy well-told historical narratives. Ideally, a compelling and nuanced story will carry a subtext of analysis and argument that is not too insistent for general readers.”9 Here is the full flavour of his gently expressed doubts about writing a serious history of war that is anything other than persistently critical. I was one of the reviewers in this forum, and I am a great admirer of what Anderson has done. But after working on Clausewitz, and doing my homework for my contribution to this volume in honour of Ian K. Steele, I must confess to sharing the doubts of Steele and Clausewitz on writing about war without insistently questioning – the evidence, the standard stories, everything, even at the risk of driving some readers back to their televisions. It has been said that in war, the first casualty is truth. This maxim is as germane to writing the history of any war as it is to politics, the press, and public opinion. War is so extreme, so emotional, so closely bound up with tribal and national identity, and so chaotic that our urgent need to reduce it to some coherent, satisfying story is only a symptom of the primal nature of the activity. Lying about war comes naturally to all of us – whether participants, observers, writers, and readers. Nothing, of course, will curb our desire to tell, hear, and retell war stories, but I am convinced that writing about war, seriously and responsibly, can be done only the way that Steele and Clausewitz have tried to do it: by question and answer.

notes 1 Ian K. Steele, Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle for Canada, 1689–1760 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969), 7. 2 Ibid., 20.

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3 Ibid., 133. 4 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), vii. 5 Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), vii. 6 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and West Indies, 43 vols (London, 1860–1963). 7 Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1513–1765 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 110, as quoted in Bernard W. Sheehan, review of Warpaths, in American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 452–3 at 453. 8 Sheehan, review of Warpaths, 453. 9 Ian K. Steele, “Narrative as Master: A Forum on Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War,” Canadian Journal of History 35, no. 3 (December 2000): 473–505 at 473.

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pa r t t w o

Political Economy

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3 The Talented Mr Blathwayt His Empire Revisited barbara c. murison

On 18 June 1687 that discerning observer John Evelyn wrote the following in his diary: “I din’d this day at Mr Blathwaites … the Gent. Is Secretary of Warr, Cl[erk] of the counsel etc, having raised himselfe by his Industry, from very moderate circumstances: He is a very proper handsome person, and very dextrous in buisinesse … his incomes alone by the Army, & his being Cl: of the Counsel, & Secretary to the Committee of Forraine Plantations bring him in above 2000 pounds per Annum.”1 The talented Mr Blathwayt was clearly doing very well. G.E. Aylmer identifies him as one of the select band of Crown servants whose careers can challenge comparison with that of Pepys and observes that “the amazing Mr Blathwayt” qualified for inclusion in his list of holders of significant offices in 1683 on the basis of three, if not four, separate positions.2 Yet ubiquity and diligence do not necessarily make for influence. What difference did William Blathwayt actually make? Were his actions driven by a coherent set of ideas? What exactly were his notions concerning empire – and did he realize them? And what was the context in which he was working? This chapter argues that the 1670s and 1680s were the period when the first steps were taken toward rationalizing the running of the empire. We shall find that these steps, part of a larger, more general movement to systematize the English government and to move toward greater professionalism in the civil service, mainly involved legal coercion and administrative pressure; the military option of control was only fitfully advocated, and in any case, practicalities prevented its exercise. As we shall see, the motivation behind these changes, and their consistency, have been much debated; what is unquestionable, however, is that at the heart of all the activity was the person of William Blathwayt, the

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best-informed man in England about the colonies, the best-placed to implement policies that in some cases he framed as well as followed, and the longest-serving of any individual involved in the imperial affairs of the period. He has been variously assessed. In 1932 Gertrude Jacobsen judged him the ultimate details man, a “phenomenally agile drudge” whose main interests she found to be English trade and the English colonies in their capacity as economic adjuncts to the mother country.3 In 1968 Stephen S. Webb boldly identified Blathwayt as the “imperial fixer” par excellence, deftly using in concert the power of his various offices to create in England’s empire a government even more military than that of the mother country.4 Longer ago than I care to remember, under the patient supervision of Ian Steele, I made my own attempt to understand Blathwayt’s career and with it the nature of England’s empire.5 Since then the course of “explaining empire,” to use the words of Richard R. Johnson in a valuable recent essay on the subject, has taken other paths. Let this fact, and changes in my own understanding of his career, serve as the justification for revisiting Blathwayt.6 Although his career continued into the reign of George I, the discussion will focus on the years preceding the Glorious Revolution (that slight local difficulty which Blathwayt negotiated with his usual aplomb), partly because those years strike me as a more coherent period than the years immediately after, and also because they are of more intrinsic interest for the study of both Blathwayt and his empire. I shall begin by briefly explaining Blathwayt’s rise to the positions he held by the time Evelyn dined with him in 1687. Family patronage had begun his career. His father, a lawyer, had died soon after his son’s birth (probably in 1650), and William was brought up by his uncle, Thomas Povey,7 a successful, if sometimes inept, administrator of the Cromwellian and early Restoration periods who had all the right connections: it was Povey’s urgings, together with those of Secretary of State Arlington, that induced Sir William Temple to employ young Blathwayt as a clerk in the Hague embassy in 1668. (His usefulness was soon confirmed: he was the only official at the embassy who knew Dutch.) The real breakthrough came in 1675 when, with the help of Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson, of Uncle Povey (himself an expert in colonial business and secretary to the Protectorate’s commission of plantations), and of Povey’s friend Sir Robert Southwell, a clerk of the Privy Council, Blathwayt entered the plantations office. The reorganization and expansion of plantation business in this period, under the auspices of a new Privy Council committee, the Lords of Trade, combined with Blathwayt’s appetite for hard work, facilitated his rapid rise: he became clerk of the Privy Council in extraordinary in July

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1678 as a “mark of hopes and encouragement to him for the pains he has taken in the plantation business,”8 and he was made secretary to the Lords of Trade in December 1679. The advancement was fully deserved, as were the rapid salary rises; even when on the Continent on other business, Blathwayt was accumulating “a very good collection of Books and Pamphlets relating to Trade and Plantations” for the use of the plantations committee.9 Reorganization of colonial finance in 1680, necessitated in part by the cost of putting down Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia, by the continuing loss of vital customs revenues through the dislocation of the tobacco crop, and by the realization that in many colonies great sums were raised yearly yet “unduly” disposed of and “ill accompted for,” provided a further opportunity for the dextrous Mr Blathwayt. He had already made various reports on colonial finance to the Treasury, including a detailed survey of royal revenue management in the Leeward Islands. What more natural than the Treasury recommendation of his appointment as surveyor and auditor general of his Majesty’s revenues in America?10 He would hold this post from 1680 until his death in 1717. Blathwayt’s personal empire, and his useful connections, expanded further with his appointment by the Earl of Conway, secretary of state for the Northern Department, as his undersecretary. From 1681 to 1683, he made up, as Conway had known he would, for all his superior’s deficiencies in diligence; while Conway was absent on various junkets with his king, Blathwayt wrote the necessary letters and transacted the office business with his customary efficiency.11 From 1681, also, his secretaryship of the commission managing the ecclesiastical affairs of the Crown, while it did not afford either a salary from the Crown or fees from the clergy, could still be reckoned a useful acquisition; as Blathwayt remarked to his mentor Southwell, he certainly had hopes of “finding the effects of their favor one way or another.”12 His rise continued. In 1683, with royal approval, he purchased the secretaryship at war, the army post referred to by Evelyn, from the incumbent, Matthew Locke (a distant relation of Southwell), and on very easy terms, as the governor of Jamaica admiringly commented.13 There was even talk in 1684 of Blathwayt becoming a secretary of state, although it came to nothing (doubtless his social status, which was modest, told against him).14 Nonetheless, Blathwayt’s “interest” at Court continued to the end of Charles II’s reign and into the next. In 1685 Blathwayt entered the House of Commons as the member of Parliament for Newton in the Isle of Wight as a government nominee with James II’s personal backing; and the following year, Blathwayt advanced in the Council clerkship hierarchy, becoming a clerk in ordinary. A challenge for the vacancy from another able civil servant, William Bridgeman, was fought off when James himself was, as

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Blathwayt proudly reported, “my Advocat & Champion.”15 By the time of the Glorious Revolution, Blathwayt had clearly built up an impressive and wide-ranging administrative empire. Moreover, as he pointed out to Southwell in 1686, his offices were all “places of pains or Experience and not like a White Staff to be carried by any or other places that may be as well executed by Deputy.” Blathwayt was, most certainly, a part of what Aylmer calls the “partial, but by no means negligible advance towards greater professionalism” of these years.16 What ideas drove the unerring Mr Blathwayt? His vast correspondence – to governors, to other colonial officials and politicians, to diplomats, and to fellow administrators – is notably lacking in any formal statement of his political philosophy, which is precisely what one would expect from a man who successfully served five very different monarchs and survived a revolution. Yet it is not impossible to come to an understanding of his views. His political ideas had, for example, little in common with those of John Locke, that leading Whig pamphleteer who was Shaftesbury’s secretary and also secretary to the Shaftesbury Council of Trade, which had been replaced by the Lords of Trade in 1675. Association with “those of the Shaftesbury cutt”17 was, for Blathwayt, neither productive nor appealing. Rather, Blathwayt leaned more to the authoritarian notions of Hobbes and of those influenced by him. He was very familiar with the writings of Sir William Petty, who was an intimate friend of Southwell, to whom he usually sent first copies of everything that he wrote. Indeed, Blathwayt was fascinated by the new science of political arithmetic, with its emphasis on numbers and statistics, asking Petty for elucidation of his “Doctrine of Money” and assisting him by reading the first of his two essays in Political Arithmetic to King James II. Blathwayt shared Petty’s and Southwell’s interest in sovereignty and in how it should be exercised both in Ireland (where Southwell and Petty held estates and offices) and in the colonies.18 A 1691 inventory of Blathwayt’s library (taken before his acquisition of portions of Uncle Povey’s book collection) reveals, among the very many volumes, Political Arithmetic, two volumes of the collected works of Hobbes, Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Discorsi of Machiavelli, and what J.G.A. Pocock identifies as a highly Machiavellian work, Harrington’s Oceana.19 While the cynic may observe that possessing books does not necessarily involve reading them, we have plentiful evidence of Blathwayt’s early reading habits and of his bibliophilic tendencies: at the beginning of his career in the Hague, he reported back to Uncle Povey on his reading (his mother thought it wrong for him to keep so much to his chamber rather than attending on ambassador Temple), and he was constantly scouring the Dutch booksellers on commissions for Povey and Secretary of State Williamson.20 As his own career advanced

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and his resources grew, he, in turn, made requests for new titles to his correspondents. That he read Oceana is proved by a scribbled comment on the bottom of a 1675 letter: “Why the People of Oceana have blown up their King [is] that their kings did not first blown [sic] up them.” However we interpret Oceana (and there has been much debate), this comment suggests that the message Blathwayt got from it was that you do things unto others before they do them unto you,21 an idea not so very different from Petty’s remarks in 1685 concerning the royal prerogative; after defining thirteen powers, he generously added two more: that “the king can do no wrong” and that the king can “do what harm he pleases to his subjects.”22 In common with his contemporary Charles D’Avenant, the noted writer on commercial affairs, Blathwayt admired the technical achievements of the French administration, which he had personally, if briefly, observed when he visited France on a mission for King Charles II in 1678. Jacobsen is in no doubt that imitating French colonial policy was high on Blathwayt’s agenda; he would have preferred to see England follow the French example and pay colonial governors directly from the centre, rather than allow them various perquisites and profits from the local population. After his acquisition of the secretaryship of war, he requested that English envoys to France send over all kinds of information, from town plans to sketches of fortifications to military ordinances: it has been suggested that he was attempting to emulate Louis XIV’s great minister, Louvois. A description of the organization of the Hôtel des Invalides, dispatched from Paris, was particularly useful to Blathwayt in drafting the regulations for the Chelsea Hospital.23 Blathwayt saw in France the exercise of what he considered a successful royal absolutism. This was a view widely held: Sir William Stapleton, governor of the Leeward Islands from 1671 to 1686, constantly emphasized the superior strength of the French naval presence in the area compared with that of the English, as well as the condition of the French land forces compared with his own. “Please to consider,” wrote the harassed governor, “that we are daily in sight of the French soldiers [on St Kitts] who are well paid and accounted.” They were also, he noted, well supplied with ammunition and well clothed.24 However we assess the absolutism of Louis XIV and the success of French government, we must surely agree with G.R. Aylmer that common sense suggests that Louis XIV’s power in the 1670s and 1680s was of a different order from anything achieved by the Stuarts.25 We have pieced together something of Blathwayt’s intellectual baggage. How, precisely, did it inform his views and actions? One of the most explicit statements regarding his colonial ideas is contained in an undated document entitled “Reflections on a Paper Concerning

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America.” As the title suggests, Blathwayt was addressing specific proposals here (we do not know whose, and the document being commented on has not been identified, but internal evidence in Blathwayt’s response suggests a dating between the appointment of Sir Philip Howard as governor of Jamaica in November 1684 and his supplanting by the Duke of Albemarle before he ever sailed).26 Beyond the detail, as in the ad hominem attack on Colonel Codrington, who definitely stood close to the top of Blathwayt’s hate list at this time, and beyond his approval of the specific suggestion concerning the improvement of rum production in the West Indies, we see some general principles. “All His Ma[jest]ie’s Plantations … are worthy of His Ma[jest]ie’s care as They enlarge His Empire & Revenue very considerably” (section 8). The second half of this statement is clear enough. Expanding His Majesty’s revenue, through increasing the Jamaican Quit Rents (section 1) and through diversifying the products of the West Indies (section 11) was obviously an important aim. Financial requirements drove the engine of empire in the 1670s and 1680s to a considerable degree. Blathwayt’s efforts to ensure the enforcement of the Navigation Acts, and the crisis caused by Bacon’s rebellion in 1676, which endangered royal revenues of approximately £100,000 per annum, testify to this. What, however, does Blathwayt mean by the enlargement of the king’s empire? He states specifically at the end of “Reflections,” in a section on Virginia, that the king “wants more subjects than Land in America.” In other words, he shares the view – held both by Sir Josiah Child (whom he had almost certainly met, for Child dined sometimes with Uncle Povey) and by his mentor Southwell – that what the empire lacked was population rather than territory: hands, not lands, as Armitage neatly puts it.27 The notion was reemphasized in section 9. However desirable in location and fertility the island of Tobago might be, the king had enough plantations already to receive “as many of His Subjects or Forreigners as may goe thither for many years to come.” Further, it was not practicable to depopulate any other Islands for the sake of Tobago. The enlargement of empire is not territorial, then, excepting what might be required to hold the line against the French, who “may indeed do us and our Trade great prejudice by an Encrease of their Power there” (section 8). (The Spaniards, by contrast, could for the most part be left undisturbed, “they being already Subservient in the course of Trade to the English Nation who may reap the profit of their hazards & labour, without any expence to ye Crown.”) The essence of empire, rather, was a matter of control, an assertion of the king’s authority or imperium.28 How was that to be achieved? And was control a consistent objective of royal policy in the 1670s and 1680s or merely a gleam in the eye of

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William Blathwayt? Once more we turn to “Reflections” for a sense of Blathwayt’s own position on the structure and personnel of colonial government. Blathwayt waxed sarcastic over the idea presented in the original paper of an overarching “Viceroy” to reside in England, with a deputy in the West Indies. Certainly, it would afford “a Title & some profitt to a Person of that Eminent quality” (there were plenty of jobs of this sort around in Restoration England, as Blathwayt well knew), but it would also interpose a further barrier between Crown and colonial administration since the deputy would be accountable only to his immediate supervisor (section 8). Good governors were vital, but undoubtedly, “at so great a distance from ye Master’s Eye, Great Temptations happen whereby His Ma[jes]tys service does often suffer” (section 9). Blathwayt favoured men who could and would uphold the royal prerogative in the plantations. He strongly supported Sir Edmund Andros, governor of New York (1674–81) and of the Dominion of New England (1685–89); he had known him since the 1660s, when Andros was in charge of salvaging tin from a wreck in the Low Countries and Blathwayt was beginning his career in the Hague embassy. He believed Andros to be conscientious and efficient and helped him prevail in his struggle with Colonel Dongan over the organization and control of the Dominion.29 He backed Sir William Stapleton, governor general of the Leeward Islands from 1671–86, advising him confidentially how to avoid the mistakes of Governor Atkins of Barbados (1673–80), who seemed to want to be considered “as it were Independant from the Government here,” and congratulated Stapleton on the honour and reputation that he had in the world.30 Sir Thomas Lynch, lieutenant governor (1671–74) and governor general (1681–84) of Jamaica, was another recipient of that indispensable private advice about the way things were tending at Court. And Lynch showed every sign of assisting the new royal fiscal agents in the colony (and with them the new auditor general, William Blathwayt); in general, he acquiesced in that tighter control from Whitehall that was the order of the day.31 Dishonest and ineffective governors received short shrift from the plantations secretary. Governor Dutton (Barbados, 1680–85) was constantly castigated by Blathwayt for his failure to send home the colony’s accounts (perhaps an understandable omission given that during his governorship he is estimated to have extracted approximately £18,000 in salary and perquisites, while his expenses amounted to only £3,000).32 Little wonder that he received no support from Blathwayt in his quarrel with Sir John Witham, his deputy governor during a period of absence. Absenteeism warranted condemnation, and severe action had to be the result. As Blathwayt commented to Lynch when the governor general of Virginia, who had dawdled in London for two years

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before ever taking up his appointment, suddenly left for home in 1683 after only four months: “My Lord Culpepper is bewitched … He is come from Virginia not only contrary to express order and without the King’s knowledge but even without the knowledge of the Country.”33 Blathwayt shared the horror felt by those with even the most modest of administrative standards at the Duke of Albermarle’s appointment as governor of Jamaica in 1686. The duke, Blathwayt commented grimly to Southwell two years later, “dances upon the High Rope and will soon break his own neck or destroy that Governmt.” The Earl of Clarendon had remarked to Blathwayt at the time of the appointment that men of another sort than Albermarle, whose main objective was to recoup his fortunes in Jamaica, were needed in the colonies.34 To list Blathwayt’s likes and dislikes, however, is not to suggest that he had control over appointments at this level, where, although he might proffer an opinion, patrons of much greater social weight and political authority were likely to carry the day and where the generosity, spite, distractions, or financial exigencies of the monarch might all affect the outcome. Nonetheless, there were some things that he undoubtedly could manage, as we have already noted in the cases of Andros, Stapleton, and Lynch. Nor could Blathwayt, by himself, end a governor’s career, although he may have contributed to that result. His opinion of Culpepper’s desertion of his post, as we have seen, is well documented; however, we should note that Culpepper was not forced to appear before the investigative committee of which Blathwayt was a member but, as a favour, was allowed a jury and witnesses. Even so, it was reported that he condemned himself out of his own mouth in front of the lord chief baron of the Exchequer court; he was duly stripped of his governorship.35 In minor patronage affairs, Blathwayt’s superior information and speedy action could normally carry the day. “I know how much yr interest can p’vayle,” wrote a correspondent (and prospective candidate) from Jamaica when the provost marshall’s position fell vacant in 1684 on the death of Sir Thomas Lynch.36 Although the only posts directly in his gift were those on his office staff and the deputy auditorships in the royal plantations, insider information combined with lengthening years of service greatly enlarged his influence. He had success, then, if in a limited sphere, in the patronage game. As one hostile observer put it, “this darke man, and his obscure Methods” could frequently accomplish what more direct solicitation could not.37 However, Blathwayt operated under the constraints of current government policy; we need to piece together the agenda of the period 1675–88 and analyze, as best we may, the modes of implementation

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and Blathwayt’s role in them. There is no scholarly consensus here. A.P. Thornton identified a consistent policy of the last two Stuart Kings to impose their power on the colonies but regarded any form of autocratic government as unattainable because there were no effective armed forces to enforce it. Philip S. Haffenden suggested that a “promising beginning” was made in these years by bringing the plantations more completely under the domination of the Crown but that the achievements were limited. Stephen S. Webb perceived in this period (and before and after it) the creation of “garrison government,” with a militarized, centralized administration imposed first at home and then in England’s overseas empire; in this interpretation William Blathwayt is accorded, if not a starring, at least an important supporting, role. J.R. Western analyzed the English state of the 1680s and found there – and, by extrapolation, in the colonies – an inexorable move toward absolutism that was cut short only by a change of direction in 1688. J.C. Childs discerned a fractured agenda in these years: a Charles II showing no real inclination toward an autocracy that he could, in any case, ill-afford; and a James II expanding the “Lilliputian formations” inherited from his brother into an army that was to be an overt weapon of the king’s power. Then there is J.M. Sosin, convinced that, in the seventeenth century, national governments did not function smoothly, efficiently, or effectively over any great distances; that administration was haphazard and confusing; and that the governments of Charles II and James II were essentially a series of ad hoc reactions to events. More recently, J.P. Greene and Richard S. Dunn have reiterated the idea that, circa 1675, the home government did embark on a policy to shatter colonial independence and that there was a trend toward more authoritative administration.38 This brief survey of the literature gives some notion of the dimensions of the policy debate. My own view is that the extension of state power was most definitely on the agenda for this period and that something, at least, was achieved, with a variety of techniques being used. Three areas, in all of which Blathwayt was involved, will be discussed: armed force, legal coercion, and administrative expansion and pressure.39 I shall begin with armed force, not because I believe it to be the most important but because it has received a great deal of discussion (and some credence) in recent years. For Webb, William Blathwayt is the master-fixer, and he rightly identifies him as the best-informed official in matters colonial in the whole of England. To be sure, he was brilliantly positioned to use his various offices in concert to achieve desired ends. Webb sees the critical moment in Blathwayt’s relationship with governors and others in the colonies as occurring when he took over the office of secretary at war in 1683 from Matthew Locke

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(referred to by Aylmer as “a nonentity”).40 He was likely to do better – and did. The office had evolved from the need of the commander in chief of the army for a secretary, and this role continued, although Blathwayt did not have to accompany his commander until 1688, when James II marched west to meet the forces of William of Orange. (Blathwayt issued the orders for the retreat from Salisbury.) The post also had important financial duties; Blathwayt had to draw up and countersign the warrants to authorize the Treasury to issue the necessary monies to the paymaster of the forces. Naturally, therefore, he received huge numbers of begging letters regarding payments of arrears and pension claims. His power in this area strengthened his hand in his dealings with governors who were army officers or who were paid in part through army funds; but he did not have financial carte blanche, and no monies passed through his hands. He also handled all the routine orders and regulations regarding raising recruits, demobilization, leaves of absence, and movements of troops. Essentially, he was a bureaucrat in this post, although the situation would change after the Glorious Revolution, when substantial parliamentary responsibilities were added to the position. The argument that Blathwayt enlarged the duties of the secretary at war, and gave the War Office a proper departmental identity, is sustainable. The argument that he set a military imprint on home and colonial administration through his use of the post is not. This most unwarlike secretary at war refused to accompany William III on a campaign to Ireland in 1690 and only reluctantly acquiesced (for his job depended on it) in crossing the Channel annually in the 1690s for William’s Continental campaigns.41 Blathwayt made every effort to propitiate civilian sensibilities when military-civil disputes arose. In response to some queries from Colonel Kirke in 1685, Blathwayt informed the Tangier veteran, recently active against Monmouth in the west, that the Articles of War had applied only to the rebellion, which was now over, and that common law should be reintroduced.42 Before 1689 there was no legally established military law, as distinct from civil law; offences such as desertion could be adjudged treason or felony and brought before a common law court.43 There was no entrenchment of the army as an extralegal estate, and Blathwayt was insistent on the use of civil courts for desertion cases and those involving civilians (much to the disgust of the judge advocate of the forces, who found that there were few occasions for courts martial in the early 1680s, leading to a reduction in his income).44 Blathwayt also did not readily back sending troops to the colonies. It was true that correspondence from the colonies to Blathwayt and the Lords of Trade (and not just from governors) frequently included

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requests for troops, money for fortifications, and equipment. Sir Nathaniel Johnson reported in 1687 that the fort on St Kitts was in execrable condition, with only sixteen guns mounted when it ought to have been fifty and with only one ladle to load all the guns.45 But complaints such as this met with little response. As for Blathwayt’s own position, once more we can turn to his “Reflections on a Paper Concerning America” for a clue. Writing of New England, Blathwayt commented that “It cannot be to any purpose that His Ma[jes]ty be at any charge (except for Shipping & and a small Honorary Guard for The Governr) for if the People be refractory The Power of Shipping will be much more effectuall than 1000 men in Pay.”46 It is instructive to put this statement (c. 1685) in the context of the departure of Sir Edmund Andros to govern New England in 1686. The full details behind the appointment were presented to Sir Robert Southwell by Blathwayt’s clerk (and cousin) John Povey. The government had intended sending Andros without any troops at all. The governor designate indicated his unwillingness to depart without them; the king gave way and seconded a hundred soldiers from the troops who were then encamped on Hounslow Heath. It is hard to see Andros as the instrument of a Crown-driven military absolutism on this evidence, or even as himself the instigator of it in New England. He had constantly advocated an assembly in New York, which he governed in the 1670s, and was disappointed at the lack of an assembly for the Dominion of New England in 1686.47 The practicality of using armed force to enforce the royal will must remain in doubt. Charles II’s army was tiny, barely 6,000 men for most of the reign, and when he showed signs of wanting to keep in pay the forces raised at the time of the French war scare in 1678, financial considerations and popular fears of “governing by an army” precluded it. James II’s army did expand to approximately 20,000 men, but the main push came at the end of his reign: Blathwayt was asked to prepare an establishment for three new regiments of foot in March 1688. It is debatable how fearsome an army it was in practice, as far as the English population was concerned, and how reliable. The imperial envoy – observing the rejoicing, in which many soldiers joined, at the time of the acquittal of the seven bishops in June 1688 – informed his master that “was diese leute so insolent und kühn machte, ist, dass sie nichts von der Soldatesca … zu förchten haben” (What makes these people so insolent and bold is that they have nothing to fear from the soldiery).48 The training and efficiency of these troops must also throw doubt on their usefulness. Regiments were often dispersed because of quartering problems; troops were recruited from areas where their commanders held power and estates, thus tying them to local interests.

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(The Shakerleys, for example, regarded their command of the garrison at Chester as a family perquisite.) Moreover, the only troops in the broken-down garrisons were those who belonged to invalid or unregimented companies and who held their appointments as retiring allowances. York, one of the most factious towns of the kingdom, needed £30,000 spent on it to put it in proper defensive shape, according to Sir John Reresby in 1683; but no funds were forthcoming.49 It could, however, be argued that, although England was not militarized, this did not preclude the existence of a military empire. The small core of professional officers usually served abroad: in Tangier, until its evacuation, in the Anglo-Dutch brigade, in French units – and in the colonies. However, the presence of troops in the colonies was highly sporadic. They tended to be raised for a specific purpose and disbanded when the purpose was achieved or no longer relevant (or when the money ran out): thus the two companies of foot raised for Jamaica in 1677 to accompany the Earl of Carlisle to his governorship were ordered disbanded in 1680.50 Johnson’s statistics on London’s military commitment to the West Indies and the mainland colonies for the quarter-century after 1660 are telling: two hundred men in Jamaica for two years; eight hundred in Barbados for four, with a remnant then moved to the Leeward Islands; one thousand in Virginia for nine months in 1677, of whom two hundred remained until 1682; and a small force in New York.51 Undoubtedly, the military option of control was severely limited, and clearly, it was not on William Blathwayt’s agenda. Its presence at a higher level – ministerial or royal – was, at best, fitful. Still, there existed other possibilities. According to Roger North in his account of his brother’s legal career, Lord Keeper Guilford once said to the king that “his majesty’s defensive weapons were his guards [the army] and his offensive weapons the laws.”52 It was a view echoed in a remark attributed to Sir Matthew Hale, lord chief justice under Charles II until his retirement in 1676 and a man who followed in the juristic tradition of that great champion of the common law Sir Edward Coke. “The twelve red coats in Westminster Hall [i.e., the judges of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and the Exchequer] are able to do more mischief to the nation than as many thousands in the field.”53 Politics and law were very closely associated under the Stuarts, and the fact that lawyers constituted the largest group of Crown servants who obtained their offices because of their professional qualifications was bound to give a legal slant to administration;54 Blathwayt himself, the son of a lawyer, had received some training at the Middle Temple before obtaining his post at The Hague.

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The move to bring the judiciary under stricter royal control had begun in the late 1660s; after 1668, judges had no security since they were appointed at pleasure and not on good behaviour. The change did not produce abject subservience; but it did indicate royal recognition of the power of the judiciary as arbiter between Crown and subject and interpreter of the Constitution. From the mid-1670s, soon after the formation of the plantations committee and the resignation of Hale, there are strong signs that the legal system was becoming a major lever of royal power. Although the prerogative courts were gone, the common law was itself founded on royal power, and the common law courts could be used to accomplish the king’s objectives.55 At the end of the decade, those objectives were amplified as the Crown confronted the greatest political crisis of the reign, the Popish Plot and the subsequent campaign to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession. Royal legal policy toward the plantations needs to be seen in the home context. From 1670 Whitehall insisted that colonial laws must be sent over for royal approval; there was an attack on colonial assemblies (for example, against the Jamaican Assembly, beginning in 1677); and there was the attack on the colonial charters, for two out of three of the western colonies in 1675 were controlled either by private companies or by proprietors. The challenge posed by such groups or individuals to an expanding royal authority is obvious. As Thomas Hobbes reminded his readers, incorporated bodies were “many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man.” Governor Lynch echoed this thought in a letter to Plantations Secretary Blathwayt in 1683 complaining about the Royal Africa Company, which seemed to wish to “set up a Commonwealth in a Monarchy, or shewe us, That as soon as one comes into a Compa[ny] ones out of England.”56 To bring such people back into England was Blathwayt’s aim; and specific legal techniques were to hand. Quo warranto and scire facias could be used to nullify the charters of incorporated bodies and the patents of individual office holders; investigations of this type proved much more efficacious in expanding royal power than direct attacks on assemblies, as in the Jamaican case.57 These were well-established procedures in Restoration England, and there had been some minor remodelling of English corporations in the 1660s.58 The Popish Plot and its aftermath made matters more urgent; the Middlesex Grand Jury’s ignoramus verdict (which amounted to “not guilty”) in the treason case against the Whig leader Shaftesbury in 1681 was attributed by the government to insubordination in London, which needed to be disciplined. A carefully orchestrated campaign followed, which included the king coming to town “on purpose to be

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near at hand” for the election of the London sheriffs. “The king knows how to assert his autority [sic],” wrote Blathwayt gleefully to Lynch.59 Once King’s Bench gave judgment for the Crown in the quo warranto proceedings against London’s charter in June of 1683, the campaign against charters in general turned into a rout; and increased pressure on colonial charters was inevitable. The cases already begun against the Bermuda Company and the Massachusetts Bay charters were successfully concluded in 1684. In both, the procedure had been slow; Blathwayt himself had slowed down the Bermuda case in its early stages because of worries about the financial implications, while the much more contentious Massachusetts annulment had met with a highly organized local opposition from the Mathers and others.60 Yet the charters did fall, and the efficacy of legal proceedings seemed obvious to colonial governors and other officials as well as to the authorities at Whitehall. The news that the king had overcome the London charter had led Governor Cranfield to suggest a quo warranto against Rhode Island; two years later, Edward Randolph was convinced that with “charters at so low an ebb,” Robert Mason’s proprietary claims in New Hampshire could never hold out on a trial at the Council Board. (Randolph had already been instrumental in the initiation of the quo warranto proceedings against the Massachusetts Bay Company.)61 No wonder that Blathwayt was surprised in 1684 that Lord Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland, was pressing boundary claims against other colonies so forcefully. At a time when writs of quo warranto were “of such force against Charters,” his actions were most unwise. Three months later the attorney and solicitor generals had given their opinion that the Maryland charter was on many counts forfeit to the Crown, and the governor of Virginia was being asked to furnish evidence with which to start proceedings. “Prince Penn,” claimed Blathwayt, was ready to resign his principality, the Duke of York was willing to surrender New York to the king, and the proprietors of Carolina would soon follow. The charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island were also being investigated.62 Even when one makes allowance for a certain hyperbole here, it is plain that by 1685 the plantations committee had achieved much in its ten-year existence. Who deserves the credit? Haffenden would have us believe that these things had come about “unaided by the clear leadership of any one man.”63 He does remark briefly on the significance of Southwell, first secretary of the committee, but we should note the gaps in his service. In 1676 he turned over his plantation business for several months to Sir Philip Lloyd, a fellow council clerk, because of a carriage accident that he had suffered, in which his coachman was killed. At the end of 1679 he sold his clerkship to Francis Gwyn because of nervous exhaustion brought on by the trauma of the Popish

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Plot (he had done much of the investigative work) and took up the post of envoy to Brandenburg. Upon his return, he retired to his estate in Gloucestershire and remained there until the accession of William III. Lloyd was not conscientious in dealing with plantation business and Gwyn uninterested; but what matter? Southwell knew that Blathwayt would do the work, remarking of Gwyn “and what he wants in experience shall be supplied by Mr Blathwayt.” As Blathwayt reported to the Earl of Carlisle in Jamaica, “a greater duty in the business of ye Plantations will fall to my share.”64 In other words, Blathwayt was, in the late 1670s and early 1680s, essentially in sole charge of the plantations office. There have been suggestions that, in at least one area, a powerful policy maker existed in the person of Edward Randolph. His biographer writes eloquently of Randolph as one of the most influential men in the history of the colonies and of the years 1679–84 as a period when he challenged the Massachusetts republic and defeated it.65 Yet the Lords of Trade rejected his abrasive ideas as often as they accepted them, and he owed his whole career to Blathwayt, with whom he corresponded incessantly and who, while he shared many of Randolph’s ideas, possessed that vital suavity of approach that Randolph notably lacked and, in Randolph’s absence, could put his own spin on presentations to the Lords of Trade. In terms of ministerial responsibility, it was the secretaries of state who controlled plantation business (normally, the secretary of state for the Southern Department) and who, ex officio, were members of the plantations committee and had the power to dominate it.66 The record of this period is interesting. Sir Henry Coventry was secretary of state for the Southern Department from 1674–80 but did not find colonial affairs of great moment. In any case, he knew that Williamson, secretary of state for the Northern Department from 1674–79 and one of Blathwayt’s early patrons, knew far more about such matters than he did. Even when present at meetings (he missed some because of pressure of parliamentary business), he did not always prevail, ruefully reporting to Governor Atkins of Barbados in 1679 that Atkins would not be pleased with an enclosed letter from the king, “countersigned by me … I assure you the letter was not of my drawing but drawn by a clerk of the council in pursuance of a report made to his Majesty from the committee of plantations and by the council presented to his Majesty for signature.” On the very same day, 25 July 1679, Blathwayt had written to Governor Stapleton listing Atkins’s misdemeanours.67 I do not think that we need to look very far for the council clerk who wrote the letter and doubtless the report that triggered it. Once Williamson and Coventry left office, in 1679 and 1680 respectively, there was no secretary of state in the

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period before the Glorious Revolution who found the colonies of absorbing interest: Sir Leoline Jenkins never interfered; Lord Conway’s tenure of the northern secretaryship from 1681–83 was sustained by none other than his undersecretary, the ubiquitous Blathwayt (we should note in passing that this also meant that Blathwayt handled much of the paperwork in the early quo warranto proceedings); and when the Earl of Sunderland was a secretary of state (1683–88), he had far more important matters with which to deal. Blathwayt’s relations with the members of the plantations committee were generally excellent. He respected the opinion of men such as the Earl of Clarendon and Lord Keeper Guilford, who joined the committee in 1680 and whose views on the importance of the legal attack on recalcitrant colonists accorded with Blathwayt’s own. Clarendon’s brother Rochester was another ally; when Rochester was dismissed as lord treasurer in 1684, Blathwayt pointed out to Governor Dutton of Barbados that he remained president of the Privy Council and would “always have a Principall direction in the Committee of Plantations.”68 Only one member of the committee, Lord Halifax, Lord Privy Seal from 1680, aroused Blathwayt’s suspicions for being too much the friend of Massachusetts Bay; but Halifax could not prevent the vacation of the Massachusetts charter.69 And Blathwayt possessed what the politicians did not: staying power. When Charles II was succeeded by his brother, Blathwayt made the transition seamlessly, his closeness to the centre of events well illustrated by his ability to send Southwell in Gloucestershire transcripts of the contents of the late king’s closet.70 The Crown shortly resumed the legal campaign against charters; in mid-July 1685 a royal statement was issued condemning the whole principle of charter government; by the end of the month, Edward Randolph, the chosen instrument for the execution of the policy, was in possession of five writs of quo warranto and ready to sail to New England to serve them. Then, however, various delays interposed.71 Although James II was well versed in colonial affairs, having, for example, helped to advance the careers of many of the soldiers who had served with him on the Continent through postings to his own proprietary of New York and to other plantations, he had many more important matters to address.72 The Monmouth rebellion had first to be dealt with, and the king became increasingly preoccupied with his religious policies, whose implementation involved, among other things, substantial changes in the personnel of the plantations committee and a purge of the chief legal officers. Both actions helped to erode the grand colonial design. Moreover, short and infrequent meetings

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of the committee also impeded its work.73 To be sure, these changes gave greater scope for Blathwayt and, to a lesser extent, Randolph in the making of policy; and Blathwayt waxed enthusiastic over the surrender of the Connecticut and Rhode Island charters and over the offer made by the proprietors of East Jersey to surrender their right to the government, if not to the soil, in a petition on which the Treasury had asked his opinion in 1688. The political reorganization that resulted from all this activity was the Dominion of New England. It was grandiose in conception but feeble in execution; although military motives had been paramount in its formation, one wonders how “terrible to the French,” to use Blathwayt’s phrase, it really was. It was certainly not terrible to its inhabitants; within three years of assuming his enormous responsibilities, Governor Andros was viewing life from a “low damp Room” in Boston gaol. The extent to which James II’s colonial schemes had parted company with reality had been made brutally clear.74 He lacked the subtlety of approach that had served his brother so well, preferring to circumvent rather than to utilize the traditional machinery of government; the alienation of many Tories had resulted. One wonders, indeed, whether the flamboyant enthusiasm expressed by Blathwayt in the last months of the reign regarding the situation in the colonies was largely rhetorical. His devotion to the principles of administrative rationalization and centralization is not to be doubted, but we should note that this careful man, who always had an eye for future developments, was a fluent Dutch speaker who had known William of Orange since his time in the Hague embassy and that a letter to Southwell at this time contained guarded allusions to the making of new friends – but not until absolutely necessary.75 Although the end results of colonial policy in the 1680s had been in some ways disappointing, there remained some striking achievements in the Stuart scheme of extending control over the localities. Undoubtedly, these were in part connected with the third strand in our analysis of techniques for extending state power: administration. As one historian has reminded her readers, administrative capacity sets limits on the activity of any government. If the royal will was to be effectively enforced, it was vital to expand the bureaucracy and to create the fiscal and administrative machinery lacking in the localities. Administrative areas had to be made more uniform and more dependent on the central government.76 To be sure, this program was never so clearly articulated as this suggests. The Restoration of 1660 had been a victory for oligarchy and the administrative reforms of the Long Parliament (such as fewer life grants, fees, and sinecures, higher

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salaries, and no reversions) disappeared as the gentry recaptured the middle ranks of the administration. Nonetheless, within fifteen years, an attempt was being made to revive the methods of the 1650s. The administrative initiatives of the new plantations committee of 1675 were strengthened at the end of the decade. As Blathwayt warned the unsatisfactory Atkins, governor of Barbados, who was proving annoyingly recalcitrant in sending home information on the island, the membership of the committee was such that “nothing is neglected by them nor do they want continuall opportunities to lay before his Ma[jes]ty the State of all things.” In the same year that this warning was issued, 1679, the Lords of Trade began to demand that governors send over the journals of their provincial assemblies to supplement the papers and reports of debates that had been requested since 1675.77 We should see this in a broader context. Just as the campaign against charters was not confined to the plantations, neither was the appetite for information. Financial administration was undergoing reform at this time partly in response to the new debts incurred at the end of the Earl of Danby’s period of power in preparation for a war that had never taken place. Expenditure had increased, too, because of the Virginia rebellion of 1676 and hostilities against Algiers. The king, wrote Blathwayt to an official in St Kitts, “could never less spare money than at present”78 A string of reforms may be noted. The customs were returned to direct collection in 1671 and were never farmed again, while farming was abandoned in the excise in 1683. (Five sixths of Crown revenues came from customs and excise taxes). Closer central supervision of finance also extended to the colonies, to which customs officers had been sent since 1673 to ensure the enforcement of the Navigation Act of that year.79 Blathwayt’s reports on revenues and profits arising or due to the king in the plantations led, as we have seen, to the creation of a new post, surveyor and auditor general of plantation revenues, to which he was promptly appointed.80 Soon, his deputies were taking up their appointments in the colonies, and some governors, such as Lynch, were attempting to cooperate with the policy that these appointees embodied. In England itself the Treasury Office was in the process of acquiring an adequate, permanent establishment of clerical staff, part of the new body of salaried servants that was springing up behind the old institutions. It would be foolish to suppose that this program proceeded unhindered; mere multiplication of officials did not of itself ensure administrative improvement. Since a cardinal principle of seventeenth-century administration was that officials should act as checks and balances on each other, it followed that there was constant bickering over responsibilities. For example, Edward Randolph’s commission as Blathwayt’s

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deputy in New England was delayed by the opposition of the customs commissioners, “matters of Power & Governmt by new ways & forms being not rashly to be proposed nor easily brought to pass,” as Blathwayt explained.81 In the colonies, London appointees interfered with the governors’ patronage powers and were correspondingly resented, “being noe pfitt to the Governrs but may tell tales and truth.”82 Moreover, there were serious problems in getting rid of the administrative dead wood. Dismissal was never easy in this period. The usually cooperative Governor Lynch explained that he could not send the Jamaican accounts because of the incompetence of the receiver, Mr Martyn, who was also making the life of Blathwayt’s deputy a misery by his “refractoryness & impertinence.” But Blathwayt’s laconic comment, scribbled on one of Lynch’s lengthy letters, summarized the problem. “Martin [sic] a Coxcomb,” wrote the plantations secretary, “– but a Patentee.” Only death or legal process could remove the Martyns from the bureaucracy, although efforts could be made to cut down on problems for the future; after 1679 there was a decline in the number of posts granted on life tenure, and there was a general ban on reversions by 1682, even though it was by no means fully effective.83 Despite the caveats noted above, then, substantial administrative changes were effected in the decade after the fall of Danby in 1679. The ethic of a reformed civil service was well expressed by Blathwayt when he warned a colonial governor that he expected no opposition to his patent as auditor general since it was not “a benefit intended originally for me but a constitution found necessary for the king’s service.”84 On the multiplication of conscientious officials such as Blathwayt depended the growth of royal administrative capacity. And multiply they did, as Aylmer’s prosopographical studies make abundantly clear: Samuel Pepys at the Admiralty; Sir George Downing at the Treasury and in the Customs Commission; Sir Stephen Fox at the Treasury; William Bridgeman, “a very industrious usefull man” (the phrase is Evelyn’s),85 at the Privy Council and in the secretary of state’s office; Sidney Godolphin in revenue administration and financial administration; and many others.86 What, in the end, are we to make of William Blathwayt’s empire? Measured by the number and significance of his responsibilities, its size must impress. He moved easily in the labyrinth of the palace of Whitehall, the last building to be home both to the royal family and to monarchy,87 consulting his friends and colleagues. He flourished in this claustrophobic atmosphere, where everyone knew everyone else and gossip ran rampant, and he used his various responsibilities conjointly to achieve his desired ends. Those ends, followed in the main consistently, were royalist and metropolitan: to advance the power and

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prestige of whatever monarch he served and to strengthen the power of centre over peripheries in the most efficient way possible. The peripheries included Scotland (there was little room for enterprising Scots in his empire, as his hostile reaction to the Darien scheme in a later period demonstrated) and Ireland (he viewed the Irish more as experimental subjects than as co-contributors to a greater “Britain”). His “good method,” which would be noted by William III, was to be seen in action in all his undertakings; but his main focus of interest was clearly the plantations, concerning which no one was better informed. If knowledge is power, he was powerful. Beyond the direct proofs of his actions and influence, there are dozens of indirect pieces of evidence: Christopher Jeaffreson, agent for St Kitts, implying that Blathwayt could hold back petitions to the Lords of Trade; colonial officials writing ever briefer letters to the secretaries of state and instead writing “at large” to Mr Blathwayt; the journals of the Lords of Trade recording time and again the words “Mr Blath[wayt] takes care”; and Increase Mather arriving in London in 1688 with the hope of getting the Massachusetts charter restored and of working on Mrs Blathwayt’s religious susceptibilities in the forlorn hope of gaining sympathy from her husband.88 Of course, the “great Men,” whom Blathwayt never wished to offend, could have ideas that differed from his own; but they came and went, while he toiled tirelessly on. Monarchs, too, could not be counted on to proceed along rational, consistent paths, as Charles II’s grant to “Prince Penn” and James II’s appointment of Albermarle to Jamaica indicated. Aylmer reflects that Charles was served “better than he realized, or deserved to be,” and this is surely even more true of James.89 To be sure, the plantations were rarely central to the interests of the last two Stuart kings; and although the royal colonies may legitimately be considered extensions of the royal government at home, they were more on the scale of English cities or counties than anything else.90 Yet, as we have seen, the number of areas in the plantations under direct royal control grew substantially in the quarter-century before 1688, an expansion furthered by legal coercion and control, which were facilitated, if not guaranteed, by a proliferation of royal officials and by a conviction among some, at least, of the colonists that there were advantages to be gained by cooperation with London. Let us leave the last word to Blathwayt himself, a man who was, as I have clearly demonstrated, far more than some obscure seventeenthcentury official: “Those Plantations which heretofore were looked upon as desperate adventures and of no importance are now become necessary and important members of the main body.”91 To that result, and to the greater coherence of imperial administration, Blathwayt had contributed much.

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notes 1 E.S. de Beer, ed., Diary of John Evelyn, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), vol. 4, 554–5. 2 G.E. Aylmer, The Crown’s Servants: Government and Civil Service under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9, 139. 3 Gertrude Ann Jacobsen, William Blathwayt: A Late Seventeenth Century English Administrator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 472, 474–5. 4 Stephen S. Webb, “William Blathwayt, Imperial Fixer: From Popish Plot to Glorious Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 3–21 at 3. 5 Barbara C. Murison, “William Blathwayt’s Empire: Politics and Administration in England and the Atlantic Colonies, 1668–1710” (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1981). 6 Richard R. Johnson, “Empire,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America, 99–117 (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 107. Johnson charts the developments in the social, spatial, and transnational interpretation of empire, the use of new categories of analysis, particularly multiethnic ones, and the use of new methods of literary and nonmaterialist cultural studies. For a brief recent survey of Blathwayt’s career, see my article, Barbara C. Murison, “William Blathwayt,” in C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7 Povey, a man of much style and some substance, both fascinated and irritated Pepys, who found his performance as treasurer of Tangier lamentable. For a brief recent survey of his career, see my article, Barbara C. Murison, “Thomas Povey,” in Matthew and Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 45. 8 Sir Robert Southwell to the Duke of Ormonde, 13 July 1678, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormonde MSS, 4 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1902–20), vol. 4, 444. A clerkship in extraordinary was less onerous, and less prestigious, than one in ordinary. However, it set Blathwayt firmly on the rungs of the ladder of advancement in the Privy Council secretariat. 9 Blathwayt to Southwell, 2 July 1678, in Portland MSS PwV, 50, Nottingham University Library. For further evidence of official recognition of his diligence, see Add. MSS 9767, fols 37–8, British Library. 10 Blathwayt to Nathaniel Bacon, 17 October 1681, in Blathwayt Papers, Williamsburg (hereafter bw), vol. 13. Blathwayt to the Earl of Carlisle, 4 July 1680, in bw, vol. 22. 11 Although Francis Gwyn, Conway’s cousin, technically outranked Blathwayt in Conway’s office, Gwyn also had many pleasures to pursue; thus Blathwayt had the key position; see Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 188–9. 12 Blathwayt to Southwell, 23 August 1681, in Portland MSS PwV, 52.

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13 Sir Thomas Lynch to Blathwayt, 25 February 1684, in bw, vol. 24. The purchase agreement is to be found in D1799/X4, Blathwayt Papers, Gloucestershire Record Office (hereafter bg), where the price mentioned is £1,100. 14 For a detailed discussion of Blathwayt’s family background, see Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, ch. 2. 15 Blathwayt to Southwell, 7 and 23 October 1686, in D1799/C8, bg. 16 Blathwayt to Southwell, 28 September 1686, in D1799/C8, bg. Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, 137. Aylmer discusses all aspects of the functioning of English government in these years. 17 The phrase was used by Lieutenant Governor Stede of Barbados in a letter to Blathwayt, 3 June 1687, in bw, vol. 32. 18 Petty to Southwell, 16 September 1682, 14 August 1686, in Marquis of Lansdowne, ed., Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676–1687 (London: Constable, 1928), 104, 231. On Petty’s Hobbesian solutions to certain sovereignty issues, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151–3. 19 The inventory is to be found in D1799/E268, bg. 20 Vivian to Blathwayt, 29 October 1671, in D1799/C2, bg; Blathwayt to Povey, 7 April 1671, in D1799/C3, bg. 21 Blathwayt to [?], 2 September 1675, in D1799/C6, bg. 22 Cited in Robert M. Bliss, Restoration England: Politics and Government, 1660– 1685 (London: Methuen, 1985), 15. 23 Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 100; John Childs, The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), 84. 24 Calendar of Treasury Books Preserved in the Public Record Office, vol. 7, 1681–1685 (London: 1904–62), 62–4. 25 Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, 265. 26 Curiously, Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 97, dates this paper to circa 1697; the Huntington Library ascribes a date of circa 1685, in Blathwayt Papers (hereafter bl), 416. 27 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 166. 28 On the meaning of “empire” in the context of the plantations, see Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 74–7. 29 The most recent account of Andros’s career is to be found in Mary Lou Lustig, The Imperial Executive in America: Sir Edmund Andros, 1637–1714 (London: Associated University Presses, 2002). 30 Blathwayt to Stapleton, 25 July 1679, 4 October 1679, in bw, vol. 37; Blathwayt’s memorandum on Atkins’s letter of 16 October 1679, in bw, vol. 29. 31 The Lynch-Blathwayt correspondence is to be found in bw, vols 23, 24. 32 Richard S. Dunn, “The Glorious Revolution and America,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, 449. 33 Blathwayt to Lynch, 18 July 1683, in bw, vol. 24. For a detailed discussion of the case, see Webb, “William Blathwayt,” 10–12.

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34 Blathwayt to Southwell, 19 June 1688, in Portland MSS PwV, 53. Clarendon’s remark is cited in Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 109. The discussion of the appointment of a viceroy for the West Indies in Blathwayt’s “Reflections” may well have sprung from Albermarle’s having put himself forward for the position. Consistent with my interpretation is Philip S. Haffenden’s discussion of Albermarle’s appointment in “The Crown and the Colonial Charters, 1675– 1688: Part II,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 15 (1958): 452–66 at 464–5. 35 Add. MSS 29560, fol. 95, British Library. The evidence will not sustain all of Webb’s details in his account of the episode in “William Blathwayt,” 10–12, and in The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 423–5. Blathwayt, of course, was well pleased with the outcome of this case. 36 Egleton to Blathwayt, 3 September 1684, in bw, vol. 22. A day earlier, another candidate had written a letter in almost exactly the same terms: Beckford to Blathwayt, 2 September 1684, in bw, vol. 22. 37 Add. MSS 38861, fol. 74v, British Library. 38 A.P. Thornton, West-India Policy under the Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956); Philip S. Haffenden, “The Crown and the Colonial Charters, 1675– 1688: Part I,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 15 (1958): 297–311 at 299; Webb, “William Blathwayt,” The Governors-General, and 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 1984); J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972); J.C. Childs, The Army of Charles II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), and The Army, James II, and the Glorious Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980); J.M. Sosin, English America and the Monarchy of Charles II: Transatlantic Politics, Commerce and Kinship (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), and English America and the Revolution of 1688: Royal Administration and the Structure of Provincial Government (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); J.P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 1986); and Dunn, “Glorious Revolution.” 39 What follows is in part a development of my article, Barbara C. Murison, “Lawful Occasions: Imperial Control in the 1680s,” in Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 57–76 (Montreal: Canadian Historical Association, 1980). 40 Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, 292. 41 In 1693, after the Battle of Landen, Blathwayt became a laughing stock for the speed of his retreat to Breda. 42 Blathwayt to Kirke, 21 July 1685, in War Office Papers 4/1, 12, Public Record Office, Kew. For other examples of the insistence on common law, see 4/1, 15, 45, 47. 43 A good discussion of these points is to be found in C.M. Clode, The Administration of Justice under Military and Martial Law (London: J. Murray, 1872). 44 hmc Leyborne-Popham (Norwich: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1889), 262.

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45 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901–33), 1685–88, xxix. 46 Huntington Library, in bl, 416. 47 John Povey to Sir Robert Southwell, 20 and 26 May, 12 June, 3 July 1686, in Portland MSS PwV, 60. Andros’s most recent biographer suggests that these 100 troops would have helped him to establish royal authority, effect the centralization of government, and protect the colonies from foreign invasion – surely a tall order for 100 men; see Lustig, The Imperial Executive, 140. 48 Marquise Campana de Cavella, Les Derniers Stuarts à Saint Germain en Laye (Paris: Didier & cie, 1871), vol. 2, 235. 49 A. Browning, ed., Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, uk: Jackson, Son & Co., 1936), 269, 290. 50 Carlisle found that requests to London to have the gaps in the companies filled and to have adequate amounts of powder, cannon, and small arms sent out met with denial that there was a problem by the commissary general of the musters and refusal to act on grounds of shortage of funds from the master of the ordnance: see Blathwayt to Carlisle, [?] May 1679, in bw, vol. 22. We should also note that the two companies did not seem to strengthen the governor’s hand very much in his (unsuccessful) attempt to bring the Jamaican Assembly into line. 51 Richard R. Johnson, “The Imperial Webb: The Thesis of Garrison Government in Early America Considered,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 43 (1986): 408–30 at 422. These figures probably overestimate the reality since disease and desertion soon thinned the ranks; and although the theoretical size of a company was 100 troops, this was reduced to 80, 60, or even 40 at various stages in the 1680s as economic exigency dictated. 52 Roger North, Lives of the Norths (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), vol. 2, 80. 53 The Hale attribution is in J.S. Cockburn, A History of the English Assizes, 1558– 1714 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 188. 54 G.E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642, rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 93. 55 An excellent analysis of these points is to be found in two articles by A.F. Havighurst: “The Judiciary in the Reign of Charles II,” parts 1 and 2, Law Quarterly Review 66 (1950): 62–78, 229–52; and “James II and the Twelve Men in Scarlet,” Law Quarterly Review 69 (1953): 522–46. 56 Hobbes’s remark is quoted in Michael Landon, The Triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678–1689 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1970), 100; Lynch to Blathwayt, 23 July 1683, in bw, vol. 24. 57 A quo warranto challenged the corporate body or individual to show by what right it exercised particular privileges. A scire facias allowed a grant to be nullified if the Crown had in some way been deceived in the grant or if subjects were being harmed by it. On the failure of the attack on the Jamaican Assembly, see Thornton, West-India Policy, 200, 203, 252.

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58 James II, as Duke of York, had been active in these schemes – although, unsurprisingly, he would fight against measures attacking the Royal Africa Company of which he was governor from its inception in 1672. Remodelling eased royal management problems in future elections and facilitated control of local juries. 59 Blathwayt to Lynch, 26 June 1682, in bw, vol. 30. The London charter was not remodelled. Instead, London was henceforth governed by royal commissioners working through a nominated council of aldermen. 60 On the delays in the Bermuda case, see, in particular, Richard S. Dunn, “The Downfall of the Bermuda Company: A Restoration Farce,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 20 (1963): 487–512. The standard study of the attack on the colonial charters is Haffenden, “The Crown … Part I,” and “The Crown … Part II.” 61 Cranfield to Blathwayt, 5 October 1683, in bw, vol. 1; Randolph to Southwell, 3 October 1685, in R.N. Toppan and A.T.S. Goodrick, eds, Edward Randolph … Including His Letters and Official Papers, 1676–1703 (Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1898–1909), vol. 4, 59. Randolph’s responsibilities in the colonies included attempting to enforce the Navigation Acts and other English laws. 62 Blathwayt to Effingham, 6 September 1684, 9 December 1684, in bw, vol. 14; Haffenden, “The Crown … Part I,” 307. 63 Haffenden, “The Crown … Part II,” 452. 64 Southwell to the Duke of Ormonde, 3 January 1680, cited in Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 95; Blathwayt to the Earl of Carlisle, 22 December 1679, in bw, vol. 22. 65 Michael G. Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 4, 220. 66 On the secretaries of state, see Florence M. Greir Evans, The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office from 1558–1680 (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 1923). 67 See above, 39, and accompanying note 30, for Blathwayt’s letter to Stapleton. Coventry’s letter to Atkins, 25 July 1679, is quoted in Evans, The Principal, 317. 68 Blathwayt to Dutton, 31 October 1684, in bw, vol. 30. 69 Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 105. 70 Blathwayt to Southwell, 16 January 1685/6, in Portland MSS PwV, 53. It had been helpful that James II, when Duke of York, had been a member of the plantations committee and was very familiar with Blathwayt’s work. 71 Haffenden, “The Crown … Part II,” 453–6. 72 On James II’s colonial interests, see Webb, Governors General. We should note, however, that what is arguably the best biography of James II deals with this aspect of his career in three or four sentences; see John Miller, James II, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1989), 43, 44. 73 On the falling off of the committee’s effectiveness, see Ralph P. Bieber, The Lords of Trade and Plantations, 1675–1696 (Allentown, pa: H. Ray Haas & Co., 1919), 26–7.

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74 Blathwayt to Randolph, 10 March 1687/8, in Toppan and Goodrick, eds, Edward Randolph, vol. 4, 216; Randolph to Blathwayt, 25 October 1689, in bw, vol. 1. 75 Blathwayt to Southwell, 29 September 1687, in Portland MSS PwV, 53. On Blathwayt’s connections with the Prince of Orange, see Blathwayt to Povey, 3/13 December 1674, in D1799/C3, bg; R.W. Blencowe, ed., Diary of the Times of Charles II by Henry Sidney Including his Correspondence … (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), 198, 199; and Plott to Blathwayt, 4 November 1681, in Add. MSS 37979, fol. 69. 76 J.J. Carter, “The Administrative Work of the English Privy Council” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1958), 240. 77 Blathwayt to Atkins, 20 March 1678/9, in bw, vol. 29; Alison G. Olson, AngloAmerican Politics, 1660–1775 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 70. 78 Blathwayt to Crisp, 23 October 1680, in bw, vol. 22. 79 See C.D. Chandaman, The English Public Revenue, 1660–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 28, 34, 70; and Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 6, 1679–80, 420; vol. 7, 1681–85, 49, 62. The establishment of the customs service is described in detail in T.C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1967). 80 See above, 35. For a discussion of Blathwayt’s activities as auditor general and his assertion of royal control of colonial revenues, see Beverley W. Bond, Jr, The Quit Rent System in the American Colonies (1919; reprint Gloucester, ma: Peter Smith 1965), 399ff. 81 Blathwayt to Randolph, 20 August 1680, in bw, vol. 1. 82 Stede to Blathwayt, 15 May 1684, in bw, vol. 33. 83 Lynch to Blathwayt, 12 June and 8 October 1682, in bw, vol. 23. Lynch to Blathwayt, 28 July 1683, 23 February 1683/4, in bw, vol. 24. For detailed discussion of these points, see J.C. Sainty, “A Reform in the Tenure of Offices during the Reign of Charles II,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968): 150–71; and Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, esp. ch. 3. 84 Blathwayt to Witham, 29 January 1680/1, in bw, vol. 35. 85 Cited in Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, 202. 86 On these men, see Aylmer, Crown’s Servants. 87 Simon Thurley, “The Lost Palace of Whitehall,” episode of Lost Buildings of Britain, bbc4, 9 August 2004. 88 Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 109, 106, 126, 132. 89 Aylmer, Crown’s Servants, 10. 90 Ibid., 53. 91 Huntington Library, in bl, 416.

4 Patronage and Governance in Francis Nicholson’s Empire r a n dy d u n n

As we honour the legacy and influence of Ian K. Steele with this collection of essays, it is appropriate to revisit past studies of governance during the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. In the 1920s Lewis Namier1 analyzed the political process during the reign of George III and concluded that the British Parliament was an institution divided not along party lines but in accordance with self-interest. Whig or Tory party affiliation meant little to politicians who sought power and position primarily to further the aims of personal, family, and connected interests. Political skill or competence also mattered little, as the spoils system, where patronage appointments consolidated the power base of particular factions, governed the entire process. Ideology or principles were easily discarded in this heated competition for power and place. Namier’s findings were so compelling that Robert Walcott wondered whether these notions of patronage and self-interest could help to explain the political structure during the late Stuart period.2 Walcott examined the voting records and genealogy of parliamentarians and concluded that voting patterns were guided by self-interest, not by party or principle. The patronage system subsumed all other considerations, and for the politician, as J.H. Plumb reasoned, self-interest and political survival guided the political process.3 Plumb examined the political career of Sir Robert Walpole to find out how the system worked. To extend influence, Walpole invested heavily to build his image as a respected political figure. The costs of constant campaigning, due to the passage of the Triennial Act (1694), meant that there was little time to satisfy debts from previous campaigns. To service the debt and maintain the image, Walpole needed to retain power, and his choice of patrons became all important both for himself and for the local politicians who supported him.

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In light of this domestic political structure as reinterpreted by Namier, Walcott, Plumb, and others, English Atlantic historians had to address this new political dynamic. Were colonial governorships patronage appointments? John Rainbolt answered this interesting question in the affirmative.4 English ministers were eager to extend their authority over a developing empire and were not above accepting financial compensation, legal or otherwise, to consolidate power. These ideas about patronage easily fitted into the mercantile definition of empire, wherein commerce and trade formed the connection between the metropole and its peripheral colonies in the Americas, until one scholar challenged this prevailing view. Stephen Saunders Webb5 argued that the mercantile view failed to capture the reality of the late seventeenth century. This was a period of empire building and constant warfare, both expressions of royal efforts to extend power and authority over new territories, evident in the practices of the governors-general, who were the instruments of royal prerogative. Their training in the principles of garrison government during the English Civil War and later at Tangier and Jamaica prepared governors-general for service in the empire. The imperatives of empire building, Webb insisted, created a network of imperial administration that personified the rule of the later Stuarts. These same imperatives, John Brewer argued, reordered the states’ bureaucracy both in size and in effectiveness. The need to prosecute war with the French over an extended period (1689–1783), often referred to as the second Hundred Years’ War, required new and refurbished ministries as well as vigorous tax modifications.6 Douglas Leach focused on another aspect of Webb’s military definition. Leach argued that the presence of English imperial forces in the colonies hardened the collective attitudes of colonists toward royal prerogative, evident at the onset of the American Revolution. In Leach’s view, garrison government was an essential component of the militaristic definition of empire.7 If disposition, patronage, connections, and necessity were fundamental prescriptions of domestic politics, one wonders what impact they had on colonial political appointments. Other studies confirm patronage’s influence but do not thoroughly examine the full extent of the pressure wrought by the patronage system. Were colonial governors subject to a similar political quandary experienced by domestic politicians? Did the system prescribe survival as the prime objective? Such a focus promises to shed further light on governance if we select a governor whose service is lengthy enough to permit a proper analysis. One excellent candidate is Sir Francis Nicholson. From 1688 to 1728, Nicholson governed five provinces in the Americas: New York, Virginia, Maryland, Virginia again, Nova Scotia, and finally South

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Carolina. Besides his extensive gubernatorial career, Nicholson was also a soldier, serving the Crown in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He began his career as an ensign and rose to the rank of general, receiving a knighthood upon retirement. Nicholson was also a noted philanthropist. The Anglican faith and its ministers in the colonies received financial and political assistance from Nicholson throughout his career. Nicholson was an avid supporter of education, promoting and supporting construction of schools in Virginia and Maryland. Cartography and natural science were fields that interested Nicholson, for personal and political reasons, and Mark Catesby received ample compensation from Nicholson to complete books on both subjects. Nicholson even left his mark on the architectural field by designing the capitals of Virginia (Williamsburg) and Maryland (Annapolis). Nicholson’s contributions and accomplishments were vast and useful both to the Crown and to the welfare of the colonies. This alone suggests that he would serve our purpose. The longevity of his career, nevertheless, remains the compelling feature. Was acquiring so many governorships a positive or negative aspect of his career? Given the highly fluctuating political dynamic in England from the Glorious Revolution to the reign of Queen Anne, finding ways to endear oneself to patrons of differing political sentiments was a formidable challenge. How did he do this? Examining Nicholson’s career in the decades following the Revolutionary settlement provides an opportunity to see how he managed to adapt to differing political circumstances and changing patrons. Francis Nicholson was born at Downholme Parke near Richmond in Yorkshire on 12 November 1655.8 Located in the Smale Valley, Downholme was home to only some two hundred residents. Nicholson’s early life remains a mystery. No evidence exists permitting us a glimpse of his childhood influences or experiences. There is no baptismal certificate and no church or tax records to indicate family, either nuclear or extended. Whether he received any elementary schooling is also an open question. However, an examination of his correspondence to his superiors, colonial assemblies, and religious prelates, indicates that Nicholson had, at the very least, some basic grammar instruction.9 Doubts over Nicholson’s ancestral heritage and early childhood influences aside, there is some evidence of how he spent his teenage years. Nicholson secured a position as a page to Lady St John, the wife of Charles Paulet, later second Duke of Bolton. Paulet, a local political dignitary, increased his wealth and prestige by acquiring the Marquisate of Winchester in 1675 and enhanced his power by later supporting the accession of William III to the throne of England in 1688.

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As part of his duties, Nicholson waited on the eldest daughter, Lady Jane, who later married John Egerton, the third Earl of Bridgewater. These years at Bolton Hall, the elegant residence of the Paulets, provided Nicholson with a first-hand view of a life bathed in aristocratic privilege. It also provided him with two important and influential patrons: Paulet and Egerton. In 1678, at the age of twenty-three, Nicholson left his youthful employment and joined the army.10 Why Nicholson waited until what might be considered a relatively mature age to join the army is uncertain. His timing likely had more to do with custom and politics than with personal choice. Opportunities to serve as an officer in the Restoration army of Charles II were restricted to the younger sons of peers and to those who married well. Moreover, vacancies in the six regiments stationed permanently in England were rare because this force experienced little, if any, combat that might thin the ranks. The only alternative was to fight for a continental power or to opt for service in the colonies, a choice of little appeal.11 The size of the home force was an important consideration for Parliament. The Cavalier Parliament, however supportive of Charles II, insisted that the standing army be of a size sufficient only to protect the monarch. Since the king could prorogue Parliament at any time, there was the ever-present danger of a return to arbitrary rule if the king had the wherewithal to support a larger force. To prevent this possibility, Parliament allotted Charles revenues sufficient only to run the government. Only in time of war would Parliament agree to allocate funds for the recruitment of additional regiments, termed extraordinary funds, with the proviso that these regiments serve only in foreign theatres and be immediately disbanded when hostilities ceased.12 These military circumstances changed in 1678 when Charles II decided to assist the Dutch in checking Louis XIV’s encroachment in the Low Countries, a decision requiring that new regiments be raised. In January, Nicholson enlisted in the King’s Holland Regiment, purchasing an ensign’s commission that cost roughly £400 to £600. Such a fee was beyond the means of a page, and it was Paulet, now the Marquis of Winchester, who extended his patronage and purchased the commission for Nicholson. The newly formed Holland Regiment, due to its late arrival, was positioned last on the field of battle and, as a result, saw no action. Nicholson and his comrades-in-arms spent the year fending off diseases rather than dodging bullets. In the following year, the regiment returned to England, where it was disbanded.13 Fortune intervened, and Nicholson (for a nominal fee) secured an appointment as a lieutenant to the staff of a newly formed regiment bound for Tangier, that rocky outpost off the West Barbary coast of North Africa, which guarded the easterly entrance to the Mediterranean.

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The Second Tangier Regiment sailed in November 1680 to reinforce the garrison at Tangier, which had struggled for a decade to prevent the loss of the strategic port to the Muslims. Under the leadership of their brilliant emperor, Muley Ismael, Muslim forces were perilously close to victory. The arrival of reinforcements, however, forced a suspension of hostilities, resulting in a two-year armistice.14 Long considered strategic because it protected the Mediterranean trade, Tangier served another, larger purpose. Over the years, in the face of a relentless foe, soldiers of the garrison, despite poor rations and materiel, fought for their king with honour and distinction. The theft of food and clothing by unscrupulous officers did not deter the garrison’s loyalty. Long bouts of boredom disrupted by drunken brawls, often encouraged by senior officers, also did not diminish affection for the king, serving instead to mould character.15 In this incubator of authoritarianism, officers honed their political skills, at once abrasive and arbitrary, which they later visited upon colonists in the Americas. What most influenced the young impressionable Francis Nicholson was his relationship with the new governor of Tangier, Percy Kirke, a man known for his brutal nature. From 1682 to 1683 Nicholson, as Kirke’s aide-de-camp, acted as a diplomatic courier, shuttling between Emperor Muley Ismael’s camp near the Atlas Mountains, Tangier, and the Court in London. Nicholson’s firm handling of Ismael throughout these negotiations did not go unnoticed. Besides winning Kirke’s admiration, Nicholson also impressed William Blathwayt, who was the all-powerful minister of war, secretary of the Lords of Trade and Plantations, and primary dispenser of imperial patronage. Nicholson’s many overland junkets earned him financial compensation from the secret service funds of Charles II; he received £100 in December 1682, another £100 in October 1684, and in February 1685, another £100 from the newly crowned James II. Attitude, ambition, temperament, military and diplomatic experience, and connections served Nicholson’s future career aspirations.16 In late 1683 Charles II decided to abandon Tangier, and the garrison returned to England. Many of the officers and men, “Kirke’s Lambs,” as they were called, were dispersed around the realm, some were disbanded, and others (including Nicholson) remained with the garrison at Portsmouth. In February 1685, when the Duke of York was crowned James II, Nicholson’s regiment was renamed the Queen’s Regiment of Foot, or Queen’s Own. That summer the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, tried to usurp the throne, and the Queen’s Own helped to suppress the rebellion. Whether Nicholson participated directly in the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemore on 5 July is uncertain, but Kirke certainly played a key role.17

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By the spring of 1686, in an attempt to bolster the king’s revenue outside the purview of Parliament, the Dominion of New England was formed. The initial choice to fill the gubernatorial post in America was Colonel Percy Kirke. His brutal suppression of Monmouth’s forces, however, made him too controversial a figure to send to Puritan New England. Edmund Andros was deemed a more suitable candidate partly because his reputation was less tarnished than Kirke’s but, more important, because of his previous service to the Duke of York as proprietary governor of New York. Although Kirke was removed from contention, one of his subordinate officers, Captain Francis Nicholson, who had just received another £100 gratuity from James II, was chosen to command the second company of foot preparing to depart for New England in October 1686.18 When Nicholson arrived in Boston that winter, resistance to the proposed Dominion simmered throughout the region. Puritan leaders were certain that the new territorial arrangements threatened their charter. Nicholson intended to investigate security arrangements in the interior and on the frontier and informed Blathwayt that a report on the colony was forthcoming. Nicholson remarked that Puritans are “selfe Infreshed and obstante in their old way,” refusing to attend Anglican services. He would endeavour to convince them of “what a happy change they have made, By being, under a Great and Gracious King now when formerly they were under a number of Tyrants.”19 In his letters to William Blathwayt, Nicholson carefully extended his gratitude for receiving his commission, acknowledging Blathwayt’s kind patronage. He offered to ship some “cueiosityes” [sic] for Blathwayt’s pleasure as soon as his journeys into the interior were concluded. He also asked Blathwayt to “[c]ontinue me in your favor.”20 By acknowledging Blathwayt’s patronage, Nicholson was already exhibiting good political survival instincts. Nicholson ended his correspondence to Blathwayt with “your most obedient and obliged servant,” a common closing remark but for the word “obliged,” which announced his gratitude and dependence. Nicholson’s deference paid immediate dividends with his subsequent elevation to the Council of the Dominion.21 In the summer of 1688, when the Privy Council decided to annex New York and East and West Jersey into the Dominion, Nicholson was again promoted, this time to the post of lieutenant-governor, his connection to Blathwayt proving most advantageous. This was Nicholson’s first promotion to a political administrative post, and he duly expressed his thanks to Blathwayt: “If I could be anymore as serviceable to you then I should think myselfe a very fortunate man; I have now onely my prayers to add yt all happiness may attend you and your ffamily and yt I am yor most obliged obedient humble servant.”22

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Unfortunately for Nicholson, his tenure as lieutenant-governor was all too short. When rumours spread throughout the colonies in early 1689 that William of Orange had landed in England to depose James II, Puritan leaders seized the moment. They persuaded their followers that Andros supported James II and the Popish element in the army and government of England and that he would turn over the government of the Dominion to Louis XIV. Such rhetoric stirred the passions and increased the fears among Puritans enough to instigate revolt. Andros was arrested and confined to Fort Hill, and when Nicholson received word of the uprising, he decided that escape was in his best interest and thus boarded a ship for England.23 Once the reign of William and Mary was secure, the obvious questions of lines of patronage followed. Since William clearly wished to preserve his royal prerogative, he decided that a combination of Tory and Whig ministers would best suit his purposes. Tory factions under Nottingham and Whig factions under Shrewsbury, for instance, competed for William’s favour, a situation much to the liking of the new monarch. The Shrewsbury association, known as the Junto connection, was comprised of several individual families of noble heritage, related through marriage and associated by strong friendships. One prominent member of this group was Charles Paulet, now the Duke of Bolton.24 Upon Francis Nicholson’s arrival in London in the summer of 1689, he presented an account of events to officials at Whitehall. Within a few weeks, a warrant was issued proclaiming Colonel Henry Sloughter as the new governor of New York. Nicholson, anxious over his own future now that his former post was filled, received support from his patron, the Duke of Bolton. Paulet, aware that William III was about to fill vacant gubernatorial positions in the colonies, wrote James Vernon, secretary to Shrewsbury, asking him to consider Nicholson. “You and Lord Shrewsbury,” Bolton suggested, “will do me a great kindness to assist Capt. Nicholson.”25 Nicholson’s military experience made him a strong candidate since William needed to restore royal authority in the colonies after the recent disturbances.26 Nicholson benefitted by his patron’s timely intervention and was appointed lieutenant-governor of Virginia, received his Instructions in January 1690, and was sworn into office on 3 June.27 During his twoyear administration, Nicholson dealt with three important matters: erecting a free public school, policies concerning towns and ports, and the need for a militia. All these considerations were complicated by the growing influence of second-generation Virginia elites and their collective ability to influence Whitehall. Further, through mercantile associations, these Virginians were increasingly able to influence English politicians to challenge any arbitrary decisions made by the governor.28

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Nicholson furthered the cause of Anglicanism and education in Virginia by promoting the construction of the College of William and Mary.29 The colony’s elite appreciated Nicholson’s assistance, as many in Virginia argued that training and educating the young in their natural environment made much more sense than sending them abroad.30 No doubt, Nicholson understood that this effort would broaden the influence of Anglicanism and his own standing, realizing “what Interest it might create him with the Bishops in England.”31 Nicholson’s influence and generosity pleased Virginians in general and the elite in particular. This good will, however, dissipated when Nicholson ignored his Instructions concerning commercial matters. Unlike colonies in the north, Virginia had no central port of call that served as a major trading centre. The Virginia Legislature debated the issue frequently over the latter half of the seventeenth century. No agreement was possible because legislators always disagreed when their interests did not coincide with the site chosen. Commercial interests that were unrelated to tobacco supported the construction of a central port, but large tobacco planters disagreed. Since large ocean vessels could easily navigate Virginia’s major tributaries to reach tobacco plantations, there was no necessity for a centralized port. Some opponents suggested that a new port was a royalist idea designed to serve the Crown’s interest over that of Virginians, notably its desire to shape commercial activity by concentrating the colony’s population. By the 1690s Virginians increasingly perceived themselves as having some separate interests from England, particularly in matters related to the tobacco trade. Members of the House of Burgesses and large plantation owners also competed for internal political contracts and, supported by their particular interest group, collectively complicated matters for the royal governor.32 As the only such governor in the colonies at the time, Nicholson was apprehensive about firmly instituting royal policy, opting instead to govern with an accommodating attitude. When the Assembly convened in 1691, Nicholson offered no opposition to the proposed construction of towns and new port towns for export purposes. Nicholson reported to the Lords of Trade that he had little choice in siding with the burgesses’ request for additional ports, even if such an act contravened his “royal Instruction.” The larger merchant firms, and a group of elites in Virginia, lobbied the Crown to implement a more centralized trading pattern, which in effect would reduce competition from small traders, supported by the burgesses’ legislation.33 In 1692 Nicholson reversed his earlier position on ports and town legislation, arousing suspicions of the bill’s supporters.

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Nicholson also exercised the militia regularly, requesting that the Lords of Trade send additional arms, as their “poverty” precluded their purchasing weapons. He suggested to the Legislature that since the frontier defences were undermanned, all able-bodied freemen in the colony should be armed, trained, and prepared for any eventuality. Virginia’s favourable geographic location, however, reduced the necessity of bolstering defences against possible attack by the French and their Native allies, a point not lost on Virginia’s elite. Further, although welcomed by the commoners, the proposal was particularly unsettling to the better sort, for whom especially the memory of Bacon’s Rebellion was still fresh.34 Throughout this two-year period, Nicholson never lost sight of his patrons. He searched continually for “curiosities” and informed Blathwayt in several letters that he was sending him the “very best and great rarities” found in the region, including a “chest of plants,” “Black Walnutts, and Cypross,” and a “cargo of Red Birds.”35 Despite his efforts to remain in Blathwayt’s favour, Nicholson was replaced as governor in 1692, a decision predicated by political events in England. In early 1692 the English government was solidly Tory, Shrewsbury had resigned, and William and Mary placed their confidence and affection in Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham, who accepted the seals as secretary of state.36 In February 1692 Nottingham chose Edmund Andros to administer Virginia. Nicholson was bitterly disappointed by this decision. Despite his continued efforts to increase his standing with Blathwayt through flattery and gifts, support was withdrawn. The choice was based on previous service and the formidable connections enjoyed by Andros. No amount of tribute could supercede well-established linkages. Only two possibilities remained for Nicholson if he hoped to resume his gubernatorial career. He could attempt somehow to bypass the established network, although at this time such an idea was unthinkable. Or he could hope for political change in England sufficient to alter such longstanding patterns endemic to patronage. Nicholson sailed to England after his removal from office in Virginia, and within two years the political transformation for which he probably hoped unfolded. Changing circumstances attending the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) and the Revolutionary settlement rapidly altered the political climate. Nottingham’s fate was sealed by the naval disasters of 1692–93, and his fall from power was a fait accompli by 1694. Tory ministers who served at William III’s pleasure had created interminable delays over the issue of extraordinary supply, and they consequentially suffered the king’s wrath. This political resistance

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to executive privilege motivated William to favour the Whigs. From 1694 to 1698, the Junto Lords Halifax, Somers, Wharton, and Shrewsbury retained control of the government.37 For Nicholson this political shift proved most beneficial. In July 1694 he was selected to govern Maryland, and he was commissioned this time as captain-general and governor. To his consternation, he found the government in the hands of Andros, who had assumed this authority on the death of Governor Copley in 1693, designating Sir Thomas Laurence president of the Council and acting governor. The unsettled nature of the colony prompted Nicholson to undertake significant administrative, educational, legal, and religious reforms that created adversaries in many quarters, forcing Nicholson to request assistance and protection from his patrons.38 The Catholic enclave of St Maries was the seat of government, and Nicholson relocated the capital to Ann Arundel, later renamed Annapolis, to diminish the influence of the Catholics and to signify the power both of empire and of its solitary governor.39 Nicholson selected the highest possible ground, a knoll some 900 feet high, on which to erect the capital building. An open circle of space surrounded this structure, with radial streets intersecting the circle from all directions, a baroque concept designed to highlight this centre of power. A smaller version of this design, offset from the centre, contained the auxiliary power base, the Anglican Church, drawing colonists to worship the one true faith. Nicholson also incorporated a market square, named the Bloomberg Square, into his design to facilitate and direct commerce.40 Further, Nicholson passed laws to build free schools in which to educate Maryland’s youth, a particular benefit, as in Virginia, for those families unable to afford to send their children to school in England. With the college in Virginia, which was now chartered, Nicholson envisioned sending youngsters, first educated in Maryland, on to higher learning in Virginia. In 1696 Nicholson enacted legislation to fund the construction of King William’s School in the new capital.41 With an educational bill forwarded, Nicholson enacted further legislation: on proper government procedures, tax levels, apportioning equal fee arrangements for trading vessels, duties on imports of liquor, and repealing trading laws with Natives.42 Voices of dissent arose over Nicholson’s domestic agenda and legal reforms, challenging his tactics and authority, particularly when he enthusiastically endorsed the policies of the reinvigorated Board of Trade. By 1697, with the War for the League of Augsburg ending, the Board of Trade seized the opportunity to reaffirm royal authority over the colonies, primarily in economic matters. Although the high tide of piracy had passed, with such illegal activities having been legally

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suppressed by the Navigation Acts of 1696, piracy still disrupted trading patterns of the East India Company. As important as this company was to England’s commercial vitality, such an argument shielded another of the Board’s – and thus the Crown’s – motives for curbing piracy. This manoeuvre would allow the Crown to gain parliamentary support in its effort to tighten colonial administration, especially over proprietary colonies that eluded direct royal control.43 Colonists, nonetheless, enjoyed many benefits from illegal trading and pirating. Pirates seldom disrupted internal colonial trade and provided easy access to specie, which was always in short supply. Some governors, regarding their own interests as above the needs of the Crown, accepted bribes and turned a blind eye to such illegal activity. Thus pirates found a haven in the colonies, most often proprietary ones, and were difficult to apprehend and prosecute.44 Nicholson would have none of this and thus issued proclamations, which the board approved with zeal, to suppress pirate activity. He channelled his directions against Pennsylvania, the proprietary colony of William Penn, who was not at all pleased with Nicholson’s accusations about the Pennsylvania government’s complicity in this sordid business.45 The dispute with Penn revolved around Nicholson’s high-handed methods more than around the rationale of implementing the Crown’s prerogatives. To enforce the recent 1696 amendment to the Navigation Acts, Nicholson adopted an aggressive approach. Ships travelling through Maryland waters destined for Pennsylvania were intercepted, they had their cargoes inspected, and if they carried European commodities and manufactured goods, they were forced to pay a 10 per cent duty. He was accused of pressuring the captains and their crew into conducting business in Maryland rather than in Pennsylvania. Ships sailing from Pennsylvania suffered a similar fate and had their manifests checked for tobacco, which Nicholson was sure would be destined for Scotland, not England, which was contrary to the Navigation Acts.46 Another feature of the Crown’s efforts to curb piracy was the suggestion by the surveyor-general of customs, Edward Randolph, that viceadmiralty courts be established in the colonies, which prescribed trial by judge only. This procedure would eliminate juries in those court cases related to alleged trading or shipping violations since juries comprised of colonists were often too lenient on pirates and smugglers.47 Robert Quarry, Randolph’s assistant on this legal project, showered high praise on Nicholson for his diligent efforts to reform judicial procedures.48 William Penn objected to these legal measures as an infringement of his charter rights and informed the Board of Trade that Nicholson had overreached his authority by the imposition of the 10 per cent duty.

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Such actions, Penn argued, were beyond royal prerogative and tantamount to an invalidation of his grant. He solicited his political allies in Whitehall to overturn these policies and denounced both Quarry and Nicholson for their roles in this matter. In their defence, both men represented to the board that Governor Markham, Penn’s administrator in Pennsylvania, was involved in accepting bribes and harbouring pirates and that their actions were undertaken only to implement the Crown’s designs. In the end, Penn succeeded in reducing the effectiveness of these legal measures, and the debate between him, Quarry, and Nicholson subsided. Although Nicholson had overextended his authority, the board accepted his motives, and no further action was taken.49 Nicholson’s reports and personal correspondence during his tenure in Maryland were not only composed to defend his political decisions and actions, but also designed both to have Andros removed from office in Virginia and to promote his own return as governor, a post that he coveted above all others. He expressed this desire to his network of patrons, particularly to two prelates of England, Bishop Henry Compton and Archbishop Thomas Tenison; to the Earl of Bridgewater; and to the principal secretaries of state, the Duke of Shrewsbury and James Vernon. In January 1695 Vernon assured Nicholson, “I wish to see you advanced to such a station as you deserve,” and offered to contribute his services to this end. A few days later, Shrewsbury expressed his devotion and friendship, declaring “I shall not omit lay my hold of all fitting opportunities to represent to his Majty with what goal and fidelity you discharge ye trust he bestows in you.”50 In March of the same year, Nicholson wrote to Bridgewater agreeing “to behave my selfe” in his prolonged disagreements with Andros for fear of forfeiting “yor Lordshps patronage.” He informed Bridgewater that contrary to the assertions of Blathwayt, Shrewsbury was indeed his friend. Nicholson implied that Blathwayt and an important political ally had played a role in his removal from Virginia. Colonel Richard Ingelsby, who was “very well known to His Grace, my Lord Duke of Bolton, … [and I] were kicked alike out of ye government of New York and Virginia by my Lord Nottingham.” In June 1695 Nicholson enquired about whether the “troos [trees?] and flowers” for Lady Bridgewater had arrived and indicated that concerning the Virginia matter, “the Bishop of Canterbury and London shall write you to ye same purpose.” Further, Nicholson expected his friend and ally James Blair to meet with Bridgewater on his behalf.51 In August 1697 Bridgewater expressed his sorrow to Nicholson that Andros “continues his ill behaviour toward you” but optimistically stated that “time and patience may remove” him. He also offered some sound political advice: “I think you will doo very well to keepe up your

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correspondence with the two secretaries and the two bishops.” Additionally, he thanked Nicholson for the recent shipment of plants and seeds.52 In other words, Bridgewater suggested that if Nicholson kept working his patronage network, success would follow in due course. While Nicholson appealed to his benefactors in Whitehall and in the Lambeth and Fulham Palaces, Andros’s defenders were not silent. Led primarily by John Povey, representatives with Virginia interests lobbied for support among ministers at Whitehall and members of the Board of Trade. With ministerial ranks filled by prominent Whigs, conservative appointees seriously lacked patronage support. Bridgewater and other ministers of state, and John Locke at the Board of Trade, withdrew their favour, and Andros’s fate was sealed. Nicholson ultimately achieved victory; he was selected by William III to assume the office of lieutenant and governor-general of Virginia. Bridgewater sent his best wishes, stating: “I hope this will finde you well in Virginia which Government I wish you much happiness in.”53 Nicholson owed his appointment not only to the favours of important ministers of government, but also to the timely and exuberant endorsement of the prelates in London.54 Nicholson’s proposals to construct nine to ten churches, to pay the clergy with funds allocated through additional taxes on tobacco, and to donate gifts (£100 to the church at Annapolis) endeared him to Bishop Compton and Archbishop Tenison. By 1705 Nicholson had donated £1,200 sterling to ministers and missionaries in both New England and Virginia in order to increase the presence of Anglicanism in the colonies. During the crucial first decade of the College of William and Mary, Nicholson contributed £550 sterling as well as numerous maps, scholarships, and his personal library, which included works by Sir Walter Raleigh, Hugo Grotius, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, Sir Thomas Moore, and others.55 In 1700 Nicholson received an invitation to join the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge.56 It was essential to the prelates to have a man in office in these provinces who, above all other previous administrators, was committed to furthering the cause of Anglicanism. Both Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Compton exerted pressure on the ministers of government to endorse Nicholson, whose “Zeal for the Church of Engd hath always been so eminent.”57 When Nicholson assumed office in February 1699, he received strongly worded advice from the board to proceed in exact accordance with his Instructions and not to govern to suit his own purposes. Elite Virginians had complained to Whitehall that the extensive authority of royal governors over nearly all aspects of provincial life led to an abuse of power, as evidenced during Andros’s tenure, and that these powers should thus be tempered. Taking heed of these grievances, the board

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tailored Nicholson’s Instructions to placate the provincial elite. He was to govern, in other words, through the advice and consent of the Council.58 Such a stipulation left Nicholson at the mercy of a cohesive group of elite families – comprised of the Burwell, Hartwell, Ludwell, and Harrison families and led by their point man, James Blair – bent on attaining power to further their own designs.59 This influential clique challenged Nicholson at every turn. When Nicholson forced county sheriffs to compile an accurate rent roll, which the elite were prone to adjust, they objected. When Nicholson attempted to alter the composition of the Council, then comprised of nine men loyal to the clique, they objected. When Nicholson designed the new capital at Williamsburg, where the Council would meet, the elite correctly perceived this move as an attempt to shift the balance of power on the Council. When Nicholson proposed a standing militia, in which indentured servants might serve, many in the elite were outraged.60 The tenor of the assault upon Nicholson by former ally James Blair reflected provincial concerns, among colonial elites, over the extension of royal authority. In England similar concerns raised by rural political voices challenged the existing power structure, particularly after the Junto ministry took office. Between 1694 and 1696 the establishment of the Bank of England, the Board of Trade, and the Treasury, as well as expansions to the navy and to the customs bureaus, were visible reminders of the rising power of the executive and the state. By 1697 the presence of such state institutions convinced the squirearchy to question the substantial number of placemen at Court, the need for a large army, and the maintenance of a land tax unfairly shouldered by property owners while monied interests in London escaped assessment.61 This opposition coalesced in support of Robert Harley’s “New County Party,” which represented a political sentiment and alignment that heavily influenced the 1701 election. Institutional growth was not the only measure of Whig success. Throughout the latter half of the 1690s, the Whigs sought to extend executive authority over the colonies with governors of their persuasion. When an administrative vacancy for the northern provinces appeared in the winter of 1695, Shrewsbury proposed a new governmental structure for the territory, under a governor who was also a captain-general. Through calculating political manoeuvres, including character assassination, Shrewsbury was able to place his man, Richard Coote, who was Earl of Bellomont, an Irish peer, and a loyal Whig, in this new position. In 1696 William III approved Coote’s nomination. With Coote controlling the northern provinces and Nicholson in position in Virginia, the potential for increased executive authority emerged.

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The grandiose schemes put forth by the Whigs, both to extend executive privilege beyond the oversight of Parliament and to enhance their own power and prospects, came crashing down in the late 1690s. Scandal engulfed the Whig ministry when evidence surfaced implicating the Whig leadership in colonial pirate activity. In contradiction of policy, Whigs had sought to gain financially from illegal conduct while publically denouncing such activity.62 With simultaneous political pressure coalescing among country constituencies, Whig political support was, for all intents and purposes, severed. With the Tories long discredited and the Whigs now in disarray, lines of patronage dissolved. For colonial governors like Francis Nicholson, the uncertainty placed him in a tenuous political situation. Other expressions of power and executive authority served only to intensify Nicholson’s concerns and those of the colonists. Nicholson’s discussions on intercolonial security needs with Governor John Blakiston of Maryland and Governor Richard Coote of New York fed the rumours that Nicholson was planning to provide men and financial assistance to New York to combat the French and their Native allies.63 Both the perceived rise of executive privilege and Nicholson’s planning induced the Blair group’s assault on Nicholson. In a memorial to Bishop Compton, Blair attacked Nicholson’s character, denouncing him for abusing and profaning the “Gentlemen” here. Likewise, Blair claimed, Nicholson’s arbitrary rule and “fits of passion” had produced a government that was “strongly bent upon violent methods.” He was “a man of the blackest soul and conscience.”64 Without the safety and security provided by the patronage umbrella, Nicholson was at the mercy of the colonial elite. It is within this political atmosphere that Nicholson pursued an idea that, by any measure, was dramatic. On 30 May 1702 Nicholson received word of Queen Anne’s accession, and within three weeks, on 18 June, he had organized a festival complete with games and drink to celebrate her coronation. He invested £500 in this extravaganza, one-quarter of his annual income. Part of the program involved contests of skill where members of the militia demonstrated their proficiency with firearms.65 Nicholson took full measure of an opportunity that was certain to illustrate his profound devotion to the new monarch in a manner that exceeded the gestures of his provincial counterparts. Faced with political uncertainty and a new High Tory leadership wherein he had no connections, Nicholson took the unprecedented step of appealing over ministerial ranks directly to the reigning monarch. Ambition and survival, coloured with a touch of arrogance, forced Nicholson to embrace a desperate course of action that ironically hastened his demise. The leading gentlemen of Virginia, for their part, judged this festival

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more as a political tactic by their governor to subvert their traditional right to control and direct Virginia’s society than as a mere social event intended to pay homage to Anne. In addition to this social extravagance, Nicholson’s views on the militia proved troublesome to some sectors in society. The elite since 1676 had sought to control, or at least to limit, the role of the militia in Virginia. Since no threat existed from external forces, particularly from the French and their Native allies in the north, that might endanger the security of the province, the elite argued that the militia had outlived its purpose. If anything, the militia posed an internal threat to the political authority of prominent Virginians, especially since unruly second-generation commoners formed its ranks. Images and actual memories of Bacon’s Rebellion haunted an anxious elite, who feared the lesser sort parading around discharging firearms. In the minds of many fearful gentlemen, Nicholson was attempting to increase his own popularity with the voting public – in this case, militia members – at their expense. In staging this ceremony to Anne, Nicholson succeeded in further alienating Virginia’s elite, who subsequently went to great lengths to have him removed from office. Coupled with this unique approach of appealing to Anne, Nicholson also corresponded with officials at Whitehall. He urged the ministers to see his genteel Virginia opponents for what he thought they were: a rapacious lot hungry for power and willing to employ all possible means to further their designs. No matter who is charged with this government, Nicholson argued, he would be hard-pressed to control the family interests that wished to rule this domain. After all, Nicholson suggested, he had accomplished a great deal for Virginia, including relocating the capital, constructing a new government office building, furthering religious and educational study, advocating for the effectiveness of the admiralty courts, suppressing piracy and illegal trade in tobacco, and ensuring that the security needs of the province were met.66 Nicholson’s résumé failed to sway the ministers of Whitehall in his favour, and he was officially removed from office in April 1705 and replaced by Edward Nott. This decision, he was told, was not the result of the complaints against him or a reflection of his administrative ability. Nicholson still enjoyed, they assured him, the Queen’s favour,67 a vital concern to any servant of the Crown. The tone of his dismissal, however, implied that other purposes may have indirectly engineered his fall. Nicholson was unable to rely, as he had in the past, on his carefully nurtured network of patrons. The political configuration of England had changed. Colonial affairs, after the accession of Anne to the throne in 1702, became the domain of Sidney Godolphin and his friend Captain-General John Churchill,

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Baron Marlborough. The Marlborough-Godolphin ministry was essentially a partnership, but since Marlborough’s military commitments on the Continent kept him away from Britain a great deal, he was unable to participate actively in the Queen’s council. Consequently, Godolphin made most of the administrative decisions. He was a very capable and experienced administrator who rose above the fray of party politics, his Toryism a mere shadow of the past. In the field of foreign affairs, still a guarded sanctuary of royal prerogative, Marlborough usually deferred to Godolphin. In matters of patronage, Marborough influenced all decisions concerning colonial appointments, although he removed himself directly from the disposition of such favours.68 With the lines of patronage centred on the executive, a circle of friends, relatives, and political supporters sought favours from the “Drummirs,” as the contemporaries referred to the duo. When General George Hamilton, the Earl of Orkney, requested a gubernatorial post in America, Marlborough promised his friendship if the opportunity should present itself. Marlborough confided to his wife, Sarah, in May 1704: “What I have promised him [Lord Orkney], and what I think was Lord Treasurer’s intentions, were, that whenever that government of Verginia should be vacant, wee would speak to her Majesty in his favour.” Marlborough then qualified his comments on the present governor, not wishing to disfavour him: “for if he be not madd, as thay say he is, he is a very good officer.”69 Francis Nicholson’s career illustrates some interesting aspects of colonial governance. Although this theme is not the central focus of this essay, Nicholson was certainly a governor-general, in the terms outlined by Webb, in that Nicholson was an experienced military officer-turnedgovernor who consistently pursued the interests of the Crown, too often in a high-handed manner. Whether Nicholson’s career fits a model of garrison government remains very problematic. Most often, the solitary governor executed his duties by sheer force of character, not force of arms. Although Nicholson’s temperament and military experience were definite assets to acquiring political office, connections were instrumental to the selection process. Having patrons of high standing and with influence at Court was a precondition for success – over and above all other considerations. So pervasive was this structure of self-interested patronage during the 1690s that Nicholson was required to seek patrons from both party affiliations. While political dexterity was a definite skill and an apparently positive attribute for Nicholson, clearly it reveals the insecurity of colonial governors who were essentially disposable assets. By extending his network of patrons to include Bishop Compton and Archbishop

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Tenison, Nicholson bettered his odds of survival. Nicholson could count on semifamilial, official, and religious lines of patronage for support. Nurturing such a network forced Nicholson, as a colonial governor at some distance from the major sources of patronage, to spend considerable funds in much the same manner as was required of Walpole, a domestic politician of considerable influence. The maintenance costs of the patronage system, in terms of deference and money, imposed a heavy burden, one that did not always guarantee success. In Nicholson’s case, the support dissolved with the political shake-up as the 1690s ended. The loss of protection was an ominous sign and one that Nicholson recognized all too well. To prevent the inevitable, Nicholson went beyond the established system and appealed directly to Queen Anne. Throwing caution to the wind, Nicholson devised a daring, innovative political strategy as he attempted to play the patronage game at the highest possible level. The effort is a clear indication of the lengths to which one might go out of desperation when other traditional avenues of patronage appeared unavailable. Further, placement was always subject to who was in power. Even with a broad patronage network on which to count, circumstances undermined Nicholson’s carefully developed safety net. With no where to turn, he made a unique yet futile attempt to maintain his place and position.

notes 1 Lewis B. Namier, The Structure Of Politics at the Accession of George III, vols 1–2 (London: Macmillan, 1929). 2 Robert Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). 3 J.H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman, vols 1–2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956, 1961). 4 John C. Rainbolt, “The Creation of a Governor and Captain General for the Northern Colonies: The Process of Colonial Policy Formation at the End of the Seventeenth Century,” The New York Historical Society Quarterly 57 (1973): 101–20. 5 Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 6 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1992). 7 Douglas Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americas, 1677– 1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 8 The Will of Francis Nicholson, McCully Papers, College of William and Mary.

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9 Bruce T. McCully, “From the North Riding to Morocco: The Early Years of Governor Francis Nicholson, 1655–1686,” The William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter wmq) 3rd ser. 19 (1962): 534–56 at 535–7. 10 Ibid., 538–9. 11 John Childs, The Arms of Charles II (London: Routledge and Kegon Paul, 1976) 29, 21. According to Childs, “the available commissions rose by a mere thirty between the end of the Second Dutch War and the death of Charles II” (29). 12 Ibid., 8, 9. A sample budget of Charles II’s treasurer, Thomas Osbourne, indicates why Charles was chronically short of revenues throughout his reign. The yearly budget to run the government was £1,200,000, a wholly insufficient amount, and thus the books were always in the red; see Andrew Browning, Thomas Osbourne, Earl of Danby (Glasgow: Jacobson, 1941), 14–16. 13 McCully, “From the North,” 539–41; John Childs, “Monmouth and the Army in Flanders,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 52 (1974): 3–12 at 5; C.T. Atkinson, “Charles II’s Regiments in France, 1672–1678,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 24 (1946): 161–72 at 171–2. 14 McCully, “From the North,” 543. 15 Stephen Saunders Webb, “The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson,” wmq 3rd ser. 23 (1966): 513–48 at 514; E.M.G. Routh, Tangier: England’s Last Atlantic Outpost, 1661–1684 (London: John Murray, 1912), 341. 16 McCully, “From the North,” 543–8; Webb, “Strange Career,” 516–17; Stephen Saunders Webb, “William Blathwayt, Imperial Fixer: From Popish Plot to Glorious Revolution,” wmq 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 3–21 at 3–4; John Y. Akerman, ed., Moneys Received and Paid for Secret Services of Charles II and James II (1851; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, [1968]). 17 McCully, “From the North,” 554; Webb, “Strange Career,” 519. 18 McCully, “From the North,” 555–6; Webb, “Strange Career,” 519. 19 Nicholson to Blathwayt, 7 February 1686/7, Blathwayt Papers, Colonial Williamsburg (hereafter bp), vol. 15. 20 Nicholson to Blathwayt, 5 September 1687, in bp, vol. 15. 21 Webb, “Strange Career,” 520. 22 Ibid., 521; Nicholson to Blathwayt, 9 July 1688, in bp, vol. 15; Commission to Captain Francis Nicholson to be Lieutenant-Governor of New England, 20–1 April 1688; J.W. Fortescue, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1899–1916) (hereafter cspc), vol. 12, 533. 23 Viola Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 238–41, 244, 249–50. 24 Henry Horowitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1977), 18–19; Walcott, English Politics, 46–7. 25 Duke of Bolton to James Vernon, 26 September 1689, in William John Hardy, ed., Calender of State Papers, Domestic Series, William and Mary (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1900) (hereafter cspd), vol. 1, 273.

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26 Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 10. 27 Instructions to Francis Nicholson as Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, 2 January 1690, in cspc, vol. 13, 682, 200; Minutes of Council of Virginia, 3 June 1690, in ibid., 924, 277. 28 Alison G. Olson, “The Virginia Merchants of London: A Study in EighteenthCentury Interest-Group Politics,” wmq 3rd ser. 40 (January 1983): 363–88 at 364–5. 29 Nicholson to Blathwayt, 23 May 1691, in bp, vol. 15. 30 John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion: Manipulation of Seventeenth Century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, ny, and London, uk: Kennikat Press, 1974), 148–9. 31 Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 98. 32 John C. Rainbolt, “The Absence of Towns in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The Journal of Southern History 35 (February 1969): 343–60 at 344, 352–3. 33 Webb, “Strange Career,” 527; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion, 149–52; Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia to Lords of Trade, 10 June 1691, in cspc, vol. 13, 1583, 473; Beverley, History, 100. 34 William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 131–2. 35 Nicholson to Blathwayt, 4 November 1690, 10 June 1691, in bp, vol. 15. 36 Horowitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics, 76, 78. 37 Ibid., 154–6. 38 Nicholson to Lords of Trade, 14 June 1695, in cspc, vol. 14, 1896, 508–9; Nicholson to Lords of Trade, 27 March 1697, in ibid., vol. 15, 862, 418–19. 39 Nicholson to Board of Trade, 20 August 1698, in cspc, vol. 16, 760, 389. 40 Nancy Baker, “Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1730,” Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (1986): 191–209 at 192–4. 41 William Hand Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland: Proceedings and Acts of the Assembly of Maryland, 1693–1697 (Baltimore: Press of Friedenwald Company, 1899), vol. 19, 97–8; Nicholson to Bridgewater, 12 November 1698, in Ellesmere Papers, San Marino, California (hereafter ep), 9744; Nicholson to Bridgewater, 26 May 1698, in ibid., 9745; Bridgewater to Nicholson, [1698], in ibid., 9754A; Nicholson to James Vernon, 26 May 1698, in cspc, vol. 16, 507, 245; Nicholson to Duke of Shrewsbury, 10 September, in ibid., 812, 420. 42 Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, vol. 9, 36–8. 43 Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, 42–6. 44 Ibid., 46. 45 William Penn to William Popple, 9 Nov. 1697, in cspc, vol. 16, 35, 16–17. 46 Governor Markham to Captain Daniell, 30 March 1697, in ibid., 76, viii, 45–6; Governor Markham to William Penn, 13 February 1696, in ibid., 76, xii, 47–9; Nicholson to Duke of Shrewsbury, 14 June 1695, in ibid., vol. 14, 1897, 510.

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47 Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, 46–7. The vice admiralty courts were avoided in most colonies and, in the end, were quite ineffective, as they had the authority only to send pirates to England for trial, having no power to try and convict them; see ibid., 48. 48 Robert Quarry to Board of Trade, 4 July 1698, in cspc, vol. 16, 633, 318. 49 Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, 47; William Penn to William Popple, 9 November 1697, in CSPC, vol. 16, 35, 16–17; Edward Randolph to William Popple, 12 May 1698, in ibid., 451, 211; Board of Trade to Nicholson, 12 November 1697, in ibid., 49, 27–8. 50 Vernon to Nicholson, 10 January 1695, in ep, 9621; Shrewsbury to Nicholson, 14 January 1695, in ep, 9621. 51 Nicholson to Bridgewater, 30 March 1697, in ep, 9722; Nicholson to Bridgewater, 15 June 1695, in ibid., 9622. 52 Bridgewater to Nicholson, 2 August 1697, in ibid., 9733. 53 William Wilson Manross, comp., The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) vol. 11, 80–1, 161; James Vernon to Board of Trade, 31 May 1698, in cspd, vol. 9, 277; Bridgewater to Nicholson, [1698], in ep, 9754A. 54 Governor Nicholson to Archbishop Tennison, 13 February 1696/7, in Manross, comp., Fulham Papers, vol. 2, 79–82, 22; Nicholson to Bridgewater, 4 February 1698/9, in ep, 9760. 55 Thomas Laurence, “The Present State of the Protestant Religion in Maryland,” in Elizabeth Baer, comp., Seventeenth Century Maryland: A Bibliography (Baltimore: The John Work Garrett Library, 1949), 165A, 165B, 165; Bruce McCully, “Governor Francis Nicholson, Patron Par Excellence of Religion and Learning in Colonial America,” wmq 3rd ser. 39 (April 1982): 310–33 at 311– 12; Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, vol. 19, 450–1; S.P.G. Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), vol. 10, 30, 36–7, 78–9, and vol. 2, 85–6, 22; Catalogue of Francis Nicholson’s Books, McCully Papers, College of William and Mary. 56 W.O.B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: 1698–1898 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 226. 57 Clergy of Virginia to Governor, 11 April 1700, in William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections, Relating to the American Colonial Church, vol. 1, Virginia (New York: ams Press, 1969), 116–17. 58 Board of Trade to Nicholson, 28 June 1699, in ibid., 565, 308. 59 Nicholson to Board of Trade, 1 July 1699, in cspc, vol. 17, 579, 310. 60 Nicholson to Board of Trade, 1 July 1699, in cspc, vol. 17, 579, 310; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1922), 50–5; Webb, “Strange Career,” 539. 61 Brewer, Sinews of Power, 32, 67–70, 142. 62 Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, ma, and London, uk: Harvard University Press, 1986), 46–8, 186–8, 202–5.

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63 Nicholson to Board of Trade, 13 March 1703, Colonial Office (hereafter co) 5/1313, 16; Nicholson to Board of Trade, 10 June 1700, in cspc, vol. 18, 681 (ii), 6, 454. 64 “Mr. Commissary Blair’s Memorial against Governer Nicholson,” in Perry, ed., Historical Collections, vol. 1, Virginia, 75–80. 65 Webb, “Strange Career,” 530. 66 Nicholson to Board of Trade, 1 March 1705, co 5/1314, 40; Nicholson to Board of Trade, 3 March 1705, co 5/1314, 43. 67 Sir T. Frankland to Board of Trade, [5 April 1705], co 5/1314, 50. 68 Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967), 189–94. 69 Marlborough to the Duchess, May 1704, in Henry L. Snyder, ed., The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), vol. 1, 311, 297.

5 Policy and Patronage Governor William Gooch and Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1727–1749 stacy l. lorenz His administration in Virginia was conciliatory and beneficent. He was greatly beloved by the colonists, and is said to have been the only Colonial Governor in America against whom neither inhabitant nor merchant ever complained. R.A. Brock, on Sir William Gooch1

While doubtlessly an exaggeration, the above statement is indicative of how historians have viewed the administration of William Gooch, who served as governor of Virginia from 1727 to 1749.2 Richard L. Morton, for instance, calls Gooch “one of Virginia’s most able colonial governors” and refers to “the long and peaceful administration of this enlightened and kindly governor.” In a survey of the history of colonial Virginia, John E. Selby describes Gooch as “a master diplomat” and chronicles his ability as a politician in some detail. Similarly, Jack P. Greene commends the leadership skills that made the governor “the principal architect of a system of political stability that remained essentially intact for the rest of the colonial period.” Finally, Alison Gilbert Olson writes: “So successful was Gooch that he was still in office when he died, over two decades after his arrival, at peace with the interest groups that surrounded him.”3 How did Gooch manage his governorship in such a way that it has been judged so favourably by historians? That he maintained his position for twenty-two years indicates that Gooch was unusually successful since colonial governorships were, in general, quite brief. Both provincial leaders and British officials were capable of ousting a governor who failed to address their concerns. To maintain his position for such a

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long period, Gooch had to balance colonial and imperial interests effectively. Thus his administration offers the historian an excellent opportunity to study the qualities of a successful colonial governor. Despite, or perhaps because of, the apparent success that Gooch enjoyed, his governorship has drawn little attention from historians. There is no biography of Gooch or any full-length study of AngloVirginia politics during his administration.4 This chapter seeks to rectify the situation, at least in part, by considering Gooch’s governorship in the context of both local Virginia politics and the broader imperial government. By exploring the character of Anglo-Virginia politics during Gooch’s tenure, this study aims both to identify those attributes that made Gooch an effective governor and to investigate the workings of the English Atlantic empire through the prism of his experiences. It also assesses how Gooch operated within the patronage system that dominated British politics and colonial administration in this era. Such an analysis suggests that policy and persuasion – not patronage – could be the keys to a governor’s political success in colonial America. Gooch’s connections to patrons in Britain provided the foundation for his political career and shaped his performance as Virginia’s governor. Within this context, three main aspects of Gooch’s role in colonial and imperial politics deserve attention.5 First, an assessment of Gooch’s gubernatorial success looks closely at the most important political achievement of his administration – the establishment of a system of tobacco regulation in Virginia during the 1730s. Tobacco inspection shows Gooch dealing mainly with colonial concerns and attempting to sell his plan in both London and Virginia. The governor’s campaign to convince imperial officials, English merchants, and colonial tobacco growers to accept his inspection scheme was his greatest triumph. It reveals much about how he balanced colonial and imperial interests in order to gain the political support necessary to maintain his position in Virginia. Second, this study scrutinizes Gooch’s relationship with the political and administrative system of Great Britain and the colonies, particularly the role of patronage in his governorship. This section examines the erosion of Gooch’s appointment powers by local and imperial authorities, and evaluates the extent to which the distribution of public offices was part of his political success. Third, an analysis of Gooch’s ties with the House of Burgesses and the Council illuminates the nature of his relationship with Virginia political leaders and institutions. The governor’s desire to improve colonial defence is highlighted here, as it shows Gooch working on behalf of the empire and trying to persuade reluctant local politicians to implement his ideas.

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Like all colonial governors, Gooch owed his position to patrons in Britain.6 The support of influential politicians or officials was a prerequisite for appointment, and London served as a crucial, ongoing source of power for provincial governors. The supporters who elevated Gooch to office and kept him in his post for twenty-two years were integral to his success as governor of Virginia. Following a successful military career in which he rose to the rank of major and served under the Duke of Marlborough, Gooch had left the army and sought a civil appointment. After several years of waiting, he was named lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1727. Gooch largely owed his position to Sir Robert Walpole, first lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer, who had connections to the governor’s family in their home county of Norfolk.7 With England’s most powerful and skilful politician shielding him, Gooch was probably the most secure governor in colonial America throughout the 1730s. Robert Walpole was not Gooch’s only valuable ally in the government. The governor also had a useful friend in Martin Bladen, the most influential member of the Board of Trade. The board’s relationship with government ministers soured in the early 1730s, and the board began to undermine the authority of those governors who did not meet with its approval. As a result, it became vitally important for colonial governors to retain the support of the Board of Trade. Because he enjoyed Bladen’s favour, Gooch maintained a good relationship with the board at this crucial juncture.8 In addition, when he arrived in the colony, Gooch had the endorsement of London merchants engaged in trading with Virginia, and he kept their support during most of his administration.9 Finally, Gooch developed close ties with the Duke of Newcastle, who was secretary of state for the Southern Department throughout the 1730s.10 Newcastle did not become Gooch’s primary benefactor until the Walpole ministry collapsed in 1742. Nevertheless, as the chief administrator of colonial affairs, Newcastle could have replaced the Virginia governor at any time. It appears that both Gooch’s efficient governance of Virginia and the influence of his brother, Thomas, were helpful in gaining Newcastle’s favour. A supporter and confidant of Newcastle, Thomas Gooch was master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and later rose to become bishop of Bristol, then of Norwich, and finally of Ely. His close relationship with Newcastle likely played a role in the duke’s ongoing sponsorship of Thomas’s brother, the governor.11 Without Newcastle’s backing, Gooch’s position in Virginia would have been much less secure. Tobacco, “that bewitching vegetable,” as William Byrd II described it, absorbed much of Gooch’s attention during the early years of his administration. Raising tobacco for export to Britain and, later, Continental

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Europe was Virginia’s chief economic activity in the colonial period. However, by 1727, when Gooch became governor, the price of tobacco had sunk so low that, in his words, “an abundance of the planters are no longer able to live by it.” If the sagging tobacco trade was not revived, the governor feared that Virginians “must of necessity leave off planting or starve for want of cloathing and tools to work with.”12 The colonists had experimented unsuccessfully with various solutions to the problem of low tobacco prices, and Gooch decided that a different approach was necessary. In 1730, he submitted to the Assembly his plan for rejuvenating the tobacco trade. The governor’s scheme called for the inspection of all tobacco at public warehouses, the destruction of all “trash” tobacco, and the maintenance of detailed shipping records to deter smuggling. The system was intended to reduce the excessive quantities of low-grade and smuggled tobacco on the market and to increase both the price and the amount of high-grade tobacco imported legally into Britain. By guaranteeing the quality of the staple, Gooch hoped to raise the price that Virginia tobacco commanded in overseas markets. Gooch was the driving force behind his tobacco law from the beginning, skilfully piloting his legislation through a political labyrinth that encompassed both sides of the Atlantic. After a lengthy fight to secure approval for his plan in both Virginia and England, Gooch’s inspection system was established in 1731 and remained in effect until the American Revolution.13 Gooch’s ability to secure passage of such a significant piece of legislation without alienating his superiors in England, London merchants, or Virginia’s planter elite enabled him to survive the crucial first years of his governorship. His campaign to win acceptance of the tobacco inspection act also reveals much about the qualities that made him an effective governor in the long run. Perhaps the primary factor in Gooch’s success was his ability to find common ground between American planters and English merchants and officials. While actively pursuing the wellbeing of Virginians, Gooch also tried to satisfy English commercial interests. As John M. Hemphill writes, Gooch’s “most original contribution to the establishment of tobacco inspection in Virginia lay in the tact, perseverance, and political skill with which he proceeded to educate Virginians and Englishmen, merchants and planters, to the necessity of such a measure.”14 Gooch recognized that he needed the support of the leading British tobacco merchants to put his plan in place, so he developed a measure that made their trade with Virginia more lucrative. Tobacco of higher quality and reduced competition from smugglers would enhance the merchants’ earnings from the Virginia trade. At the same time, Gooch’s tobacco scheme appealed to colonial planters because it promised to increase the price paid for their tobacco exports. Finally,

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English government officials threw their support behind the act because Gooch’s “impeccably mercantilist arguments” convinced them that it would raise customs revenues and help Britain to capture a greater share of the European tobacco market.15 The governor’s tobacco plan was successful because it worked simultaneously for the benefit of Virginia and Great Britain. Developing a workable system of tobacco regulation enabled Gooch to earn the favour of the colony’s gentleman planters, a group whose support was essential to the political survival of any governor. In Greene’s words, Gooch “discovered early in his administration that the secret of political success for a Virginia governor was to reach an accord with the plantation gentry.” These great planters had the resources in slaves and capital necessary to produce a crop of the highest quality that, with government certification, was sure to command top prices in Europe. By devising a measure that appealed to the large planters, Gooch attached himself to the elite, who dominated Virginia’s political life. The governor “in effect made himself the prime minister of the local gentry.”16 This not only negated a potentially dangerous source of opposition, but also ensured that the governor’s tobacco plan would be endorsed by both the House of Burgesses and the Council, where the colony’s leading planters had a great deal of influence. Gooch took several astute steps to neutralize possible resistance to his program. The process started in the spring of 1729 when the governor conferred with the most influential planters and merchants in advance, instead of presenting them with an imperial fait accompli. Having received at least their tentative approval, Gooch’s next step was to secure allies within the imperial bureaucracy before revealing his plan publicly to the colonists. Strategically, he hoped to obtain the endorsement of the Board of Trade before the Legislature convened. A plan that was already supported by British officials could appeal to Virginians because it would not face several years of transatlantic political wrangling before being accepted in England. As a result, Gooch submitted his proposals to the Board of Trade in June 1729.17 To his metropolitan audience, Gooch stressed the advantages that the act would confer upon Britain, downplaying the benefits that colonial planters would enjoy from tobacco regulation. To persuade the Board of Trade, Gooch had to demonstrate that several provisions of the act were designed to improve royal revenues. Understanding the board’s concern for the loss of income that resulted from contraband tobacco being sold in Britain, Gooch argued that strict tobacco inspection in Virginia would sharply reduce the illegal practice. He described the bill as seeking to “effectually put a stop to that pernicious practice of running tobacco without paying the duty, which has been no less

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injurious to the fair trader, than prejudicial to H.M. revenue.” Knowing that the Board of Trade should respond favourably to an initiative aimed at limiting smuggling, Gooch was careful to emphasize that tobacco inspectors and customs officials would be required to keep thorough records of the amount of tobacco leaving Virginia and entering Great Britain. In this way, any tobacco “pillaged in the voyage” by a ship’s crew to sell illegally in Britain would be more easily detected.18 It was also crucial for Gooch to persuade the Board of Trade that his tobacco plan would result in an increase in the amount of tobacco shipped to Britain, not in the decrease predicted by some opponents of the measure. The overall effect of inspection would be to enhance – not undermine – customs revenues. Although the governor conceded that the price of tobacco would likely rise under regulation, he also pointed out that the quality of the staple should improve. And “since the Rich and even People of middling Fortunes will ever be fonder of smoaking good than bad Tobacco, be the Price what it will … ’tis rather to be expected that a more agreable Tobacco will draw them into a greater inclination to use a much larger quantity.”19 Gooch believed that the higher-quality tobacco exported under the inspection law would trigger a rise in the demand for the staple overseas. Moreover, because the new system of tobacco regulation removed restrictions on production that were intended to boost the price of tobacco by curtailing the supply, Virginia planters would be free to meet this demand. As a result, the quantity of tobacco on which the British government collected duty would increase.20 Finally, Gooch noted that tobacco inspection would reduce the threat that disenchanted planters posed to English manufacturers “if the planters discouraged from making tobacco by the lowness of the price, should be driven to the necessity of laying that aside, and should provide themselves with their own cloathing from the materials this country affords.”21 Convincing Whitehall of the need for strict tobacco inspection was only one step in assuring metropolitan support for Gooch’s act. The governor realized that he also needed the backing of the British mercantile community. These merchants constituted a powerful interest group, and they had already repudiated several proposals from the colonies during the first few years of Gooch’s administration.22 As a result, Gooch sought the endorsement of Micajah Perry, member of Parliament for London and a prominent participant in the trade with Virginia, in order to facilitate the plan’s acceptance by the Board of Trade.23 When Gooch presented his tobacco reforms to the English bureaucracy, he submitted the same proposals to Perry and other London merchants. Several weeks before the governor’s tobacco design would be introduced to the colonial Assembly, Perry informed him

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that the merchants involved in the Virginia trade had “no objections” to his plan.24 A group of merchants appearing before the Board of Trade in February 1731 also spoke in favour of the inspection measure, informing the board that “they thought the Act would be of advantage to the tobacco trade.”25 Confirming the support of the leading tobacco merchants in London was a crucial victory for Gooch. With English merchants and officials behind him, the governor had persuasive evidence to convince Virginians of the merit of his proposals. Gooch put his comprehensive tobacco inspection system before the House of Burgesses on 21 May 1730. He told the Assembly that his intention was “to promote the Welfare and Prosperity of this Province” through “a prudent Regulation of your Trade.”26 The act’s primary aim was to guarantee a high standard of quality for the colony’s staple, thereby boosting the reputation of Virginia’s tobacco and generating a more favourable market for its sale. The bill was intended to help the colony in other ways, as well. The law was to benefit Virginians by standardizing the size of hogsheads. In addition, tobacco regulation called for the creation of a uniform system of currency for the colony by making all public dues and private debts payable only in high-grade tobacco. This would put an end to the common practice of using tobacco based solely on weight, not quality, as legal tender.27 Gooch’s scheme thus sought to augment government revenues and to enhance the salaries of public officials who were paid in tobacco. Finally, the governor’s inspection system provided for a more flexible and practical system of currency. Planters stood to receive tobacco notes of various denominations after their tobacco had been weighed. These notes were to circulate as money, supplanting cumbersome hogsheads as the colony’s medium of exchange. As a result, planters would gain the flexibility of making their purchases from various merchants rather than being restricted to a single retailer by the practical impossibility of dividing a hogshead into sections.28 The House of Burgesses passed the tobacco bill in 1730 by an overwhelming majority of forty-six to five.29 Despite the lopsided nature of the final vote in the House, there was substantial initial opposition to the inspection act among the burgesses. Most of this resistance appears to have come from planters who questioned the usefulness of a law that would permit unlimited production. Instead, they favoured the enactment of a more rigorous stint law that would set lower limits on the number of tobacco plants that each worker could grow. This group believed that curtailing production was the most effective way to raise the price of tobacco.30 The Council later made several minor modifications to the act, but none of these changes fundamentally altered Gooch’s plan. The end result was that, in his words, “an act is now

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passed, which tho’ not in every article the same with my scheme, yet all the essential parts of it are the same.”31 The following year, on 19 May 1731, the Board of Trade recommended that the tobacco inspection law be passed on a probationary basis, “until the Effects of it may be seen.”32 The act was implemented in Virginia on 1 August 1731. In economic terms, Gooch’s tobacco bill was an instant success. After the law’s first year of operation, the governor reported to the Board of Trade that “the Colony will get some thousands of pounds more than if the whole Crop had gone to market.” During the first two years of tobacco regulation, prices almost doubled, and the volume of tobacco exported to Great Britain in the 1730s was higher than in any previous decade.33 Despite these gains, there were still several political battles to be fought over the inspection issue. Opposition to the tobacco bill was strongest among the colony’s small and middling planters, who feared that a disproportionate share of their crops would be destroyed under the new certification program. Although many small planters resisted inspection until the early 1740s, the tobacco law was safe because it quickly gained acceptance among the large planters who controlled the Assembly.34 Tobacco regulation had become a permanent part of the Virginia economy. While Gooch was sustained by powerful political connections in Britain, his control of patronage in Virginia was extremely limited. In part, this was related to the passage of the governor’s tobacco plan. To ensure the acceptance of the tobacco bill by the Assembly, Gooch was willing to relinquish any patronage power that the new inspectorships may have provided. A “place” bill, passed along with the tobacco law, provided that any member of the House appointed to a salaried office, including a tobacco inspectorship, by the governor had to resign from the Legislature.35 This radically reduced the governor’s ability to reward his supporters in the House with additional public offices. Gooch would not be allowed an opportunity to assemble a substantial patronage network through tobacco regulation. In accepting the place bill, Gooch chose a very different path from that of Governor Alexander Spotswood, who had attempted to establish a similar tobacco inspection system in Virginia in 1713.36 In contrast to Gooch’s measure, Spotswood’s plan would have extended his own power over the colonists by using tobacco inspectorships to induce burgesses to cooperate with the governor. Each position, or agency, paid £250 per year – an amount that compared favourably with a Virginia councillor’s annual salary of £350.37 Spotswood wrote to the Board of Trade in 1713, “I have, in a great measure, I think, clear’d the way for a Gov’r towards carrying any reasonable point in the House

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of Burgesses, for he will have in his disposal about forty Agencys … these, my intentions are to dispose of among ye most considerable men of the Colony, and principally to gratify with a Place all the members of the Assembly who were for the bill.”38 Such a scenario would give Spotswood substantial authority, enabling him to reward his supporters in the House with appointments as tobacco agents. Spotswood’s promise of lucrative tobacco inspectorships for burgesses who backed his plan secured passage of the law by the Legislature. The governor then attempted to use the new inspectors’ posts as leverage to control the House of Burgesses. The tobacco act created forty inspectorships, and, between the 1713 and 1714 sessions of the Assembly, Spotswood appointed twenty-nine of the fifty-one burgesses to these positions. Another four burgesses had sons or brothers named tobacco agents. Spotswood’s burgesses did not remain in power very long, however, as widespread public hostility to the tobacco act swept them out of office in the elections of 1715. Amid cries that the governor had bought the Assembly and that Spotswood’s appointees had betrayed their constituents, only sixteen of the fifty-one burgesses who had passed Spotswood’s tobacco program were returned to office, and only one of these men was a tobacco inspector.39 In the words of David A. Williams, “There can be no doubt that Spotswood’s attempt to court friends and influence legislation through patronage had backfired and had resulted in the defeat of numerous burgesses who might otherwise have been re-elected.”40 Opposition to Spotswood’s public inspection program had coalesced around the patronage opportunities that it provided for the governor. When the House of Burgesses attempted to repeal the tobacco law in 1715, Spotswood vetoed the bill. From that point on, the governor and the burgesses were locked in conflict. At the same time, Spotswood’s relations with the upper chamber, the Council, were beginning to deteriorate. In July 1717, on the recommendation of William Byrd and the English merchants, the Board of Trade scuttled the tobacco act. With an array of opponents on both sides of the Atlantic, Spotswood was relieved of his duties as governor in 1722. Although there is no direct link between the opposition to Spotswood’s tobacco program and his removal from office, the antagonism generated by his plan to regulate the staple was instrumental in souring relations between the governor and the Assembly. Spotswood’s misguided patronage scheme helped lay the foundation for his dismissal by provoking the anger of the public and, in turn, the burgesses. Such general antagonism was a scenario that Gooch successfully avoided.41 During the 1730s, British officials also eroded Gooch’s capacity to fill public posts in Virginia. Colonial American patronage fell mainly under

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Newcastle’s supervision, and the duke was determined to distribute offices to the friends and supporters of his key political associates. As Stanley Nider Katz writes, “He viewed administration as a branch of politics, a reservoir of jobs to be distributed among parliamentary supporters of the ministry, and he selected colonial officeholders in accordance with the necessities of the English political situation.”42 Eager to improve his own political standing through the management of patronage, Newcastle sought to extend his control over the allocation of positions in America. When he became Secretary of State in 1724, Newcastle had approximately forty American offices at his disposal. By 1730 the total number of places dispensed by the southern secretary had climbed to sixty, and by 1748 it had risen to eighty-five.43 In Virginia, Gooch had direct control of only one post by 1739: the naval officers in charge of customs at several river locations. The governor’s influence over other public positions was minor. In the early 1740s Newcastle also brought the Virginia naval offices into his own patronage web. As a result, Gooch had virtually no appointments at his disposal. Virginian legislation and English interference had made it almost impossible for Gooch to offer political office to his supporters in the colony.44 What effect did this invasion of Gooch’s patronage power have on his ability to manage colonial affairs? If, as several historians claim, patronage was a crucial component of a governor’s authority, then Gooch’s inability to offer places of profit and advantage to key players in Virginia politics must have seriously diminished his effectiveness.45 During the bulk of his time in Virginia, Gooch faced an outright ban on government officials sitting in the House of Burgesses, as well as the persistent meddling of British administrators. Despite this loss of patronage, Gooch remained at the centre of political action in the colony because patronage was never one of his primary political weapons. Gooch built on Spotswood’s tobacco scheme but without trying to turn inspectorships into political posts that he controlled. Learning from Spotswood’s mistakes, Gooch understood that any attempt to create a “court” party in the Legislature through the distribution of patronage was certain to end in failure. Instead, he recognized that political stability in colonial Virginia was more likely to emerge out of a “country” pattern – that is, a system with a strong, independent executive whose salary was beyond the reach of the Legislature and with a strong, independent Assembly that voters refused to see coerced through executive patronage.46 Gooch cultivated the colonists’ favour by advocating prudent policies, such as tobacco inspection, and by avoiding the confrontational politics that brought down other provincial governors. The soundness of his policy, not the scope of his appointment power, was the key to Gooch’s influence in the Assembly.

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From the beginning of his tenure as governor of Virginia, Gooch enjoyed a cooperative working relationship with local political leaders and institutions. This positive connection was evident in Gooch’s advancement of tobacco regulation, and it continued through the remainder of his administration as well. Although the governor and the Assembly certainly did not share the same views on all issues, there were no major clashes between the two during Gooch’s government. The Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia are filled with accolades for the governor.47 Similarly, Gooch’s correspondence with the Board of Trade and the Duke of Newcastle is a testament to the amicable relationship that existed between the governor and both the Council and the House of Burgesses.48 Gooch earned the colonists’ favour through a leadership style that emphasized compromise and conciliation above coercion and confrontation. He preferred to negotiate with Virginians rather than to impose his own ideas upon them. If Gooch thought that the Assembly was pursuing misguided policies, he did not hesitate to put forward his own solutions. On certain issues, particularly tobacco regulation, he was determined to have the Legislature follow his lead. However, Gooch did not seek to dominate the Assembly. By promoting measures helpful to colonial planters, reacting amicably to political setbacks, and collaborating with members of the House and the Council, Gooch established a productive relationship with provincial politicians. Throughout his tenure, the large majority of Virginia’s legislators backed his administration. Moreover, although the House of Burgesses was free to pursue its own policies, the institutional cooperation that developed in this period also gave the governor significant personal influence over legislation.49 One of Gooch’s main concerns during his governorship was colonial defence. In the 1730s and, increasingly, in the 1740s he made a number of efforts to persuade Virginians to make a greater contribution to the defence of the empire. For example, during the 1734 and 1736 sessions of the Assembly, Gooch urged the colonists to improve Virginia’s militia system. Although the Council seemed willing to enact the measures needed to create a more effective militia, Gooch faced considerable opposition to his ideas in the House of Burgesses. The burgesses refused to impose higher taxes in order to pay for supplies, and they resisted a move to take stronger disciplinary action against those who failed to carry out their militia responsibilities. Another area of dispute between the two houses of the Legislature was the frequency with which captains would be required to muster and train their troops. The Council called for at least twelve militia drills annually, while the burgesses wanted the militia to be mustered a minimum of

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three times each year. In addition, the House of Burgesses tried to reduce the power of the county lieutenants, but members of the Council opposed this measure because most of them also held this position.50 In 1738 the growing threat of Indian raids on the frontier forced the Council and the House of Burgesses to come to an agreement on some of Gooch’s suggestions for militia reform. The militia bill passed during this session was in line more with the wishes of the burgesses than with those of the Council members. The burden of militia service on Virginians remained light, as captains were required to muster, train, and exercise their companies only once every four months. Many councillors also saw their authority diminished as some of the powers of the county lieutenants were shifted to other officers.51 In 1739 Britain and Spain became embroiled in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, primarily over British navigation and trade in the Caribbean. In May 1740 Gooch and the Assembly concurred on a series of measures designed to support the war against Spain by improving the province’s defences, raising troops for a campaign in the West Indies, and providing funds to cover the costs of food and transportation for Virginia soldiers involved in the expedition.52 Acknowledging that the conflict was “likely to be near at our Doors,” the House of Burgesses noted that it was necessary to “make such Preparations, as our Circumstances will admit, for our Defence and Security, against a cruel and revengeful Enemy.”53 First, the Assembly ordered that militia training was to take place more regularly. Militia company musters would now be required at least every two months. The burgesses also provided £2,000 from the Treasury to purchase more arms for the militia.54 In addition, the Legislature responded to a call for soldiers by the British government by empowering justices of the peace to conscript “such able-bodied men as do not follow or exercise any lawful calling or employment, or have not some other lawful and sufficient support and maintenance,” into a Virginia contingent that would aid Britain in the conflict with Spain.55 Later that summer, the burgesses authorized expenditures of £5,000 to support the 400 troops raised in Virginia for an American regiment.56 This package of legislation was certainly welcomed by Gooch, who congratulated the colonists for “Promoting and Encouraging the intended Expedition, and Providing for your own Defence.”57 Preparations for the Caribbean campaign occupied much of Gooch’s time during the spring and summer of 1740. Former Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood was appointed to command the American detachment in the West Indies, but when Spotswood died suddenly in June 1740, Gooch assumed control of the 3,000 American soldiers raised in the colonies. He was not promoted to the rank of

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major general, however, and therefore was not entitled to sit at the councils of war during the campaign. Gooch and the American regiment arrived in Jamaica in early December, where they were united with an English force under the joint command of Vice Admiral Edward Vernon and Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth.58 The American regiment’s stay in the West Indies was a disaster from the outset. In Jamaica there were problems with the troops’ pay and victuals, and conditions deteriorated once the attack on Cartagena, a Spanish seaport on the northern coast of South America, began in March 1741. More than 10,000 of the 14,000 soldiers sent from Britain and North America died, although fewer than 1,000 of these were killed in action. Disease wiped out the bulk of the troops. Yellow fever and malaria, in particular, ravaged the Anglo-American forces once they arrived in the tropics. After a fatally slow siege of the seaport’s outer forts and a clumsily executed offensive against the main fort dominating the city, the combined British and American force retreated to Jamaica in May. Gooch was wounded in the battle at Cartagena, and he returned to Virginia in July 1741.59 Following the Cartagena debacle, defence expenditures became a more significant point of contention between the House of Burgesses on one side and the governor and Council on the other.60 Gooch’s main difficulty was getting the burgesses to provide funds for the defence measures that he proposed. The House was reluctant to allocate more tax money for upgrading defence, maintaining that it provided for such improvements through the existing duties on tobacco exports, shipping, and imported persons. This money was under the control of the governor and the Council.61 Although Gooch complained that these funds were insufficient to cover the colony’s military expenditures, the House of Burgesses refused to provide additional money. This conflict was evident in 1742 when Gooch urged the Assembly to fund the repair of Fort George and the batteries at Yorktown and Gloucester Point as well as to “appoint annual Salaries for such Officers and Gunners as shall be deemed sufficient … to keep Them … in a Constant Posture of Defence.” The burgesses acknowledged the importance of repairing and staffing the colony’s forts but insisted that these costs should be paid out of the duties already appropriated by the Assembly for such purposes.62 Perhaps the best example of this friction between Gooch and the burgesses occurred during the 1744 session of the Assembly when the governor put forward an ambitious plan to prepare Virginia for involvement in the war with France. This proposal included provisions to shore up the province’s fortifications and to ready Virginia’s forces for an offensive strike outside the colony. Improving imperial defence

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proved to be a low priority for the burgesses. The House refused to appropriate funds for overhauling the province’s defence structures or for purchasing additional arms, and it defeated a militia bill that called for more frequent training. The burgesses also spurned a committee recommendation that urged “[t]hat a Vessel be provided, at the Expence of the Country, to carry One Hundred and Fifty Men, for the Guarding of our Coast, and the Protection of our Trade.” Gooch’s defence program was repudiated entirely.63 The disastrous expedition to the West Indies made Virginians reluctant to do anything that might commit them to a similar venture in the future. In 1744 the burgesses asked Gooch to prevent further enlistments of persons in Virginia for military service outside the colony. The governor turned down this request.64 In 1746, however, the Assembly agreed to provide financial backing for Virginia’s participation in a planned expedition against French Canada. The Legislature voted sufficient funds to cover the costs of raising and equipping a contingent of troops in Virginia and of transporting them to Albany, New York, where they would join soldiers from other colonies. In this case, the province’s legislators responded to Gooch’s request for heightened military expenditures because they were beginning to see the French presence on the continent as a direct threat not only to the northern colonies, but to Virginia as well.65 Gooch was clearly more concerned about the defence of the empire than was the House of Burgesses. At the same time, Gooch was not prepared to go to great lengths to persuade the burgesses to accept his ideas about colonial defence. The governor’s reluctance to act more forcefully in pushing the burgesses to accept his plan demonstrates that he did not consider improving the province’s defences to be as important to Virginia as an economic issue like tobacco regulation. Although Gooch sought a balance between colonial and imperial interests, it appears that he was more willing to stand up for Virginia in London than to fight for the empire in Williamsburg. Throughout his stay in Virginia, Gooch had attempted to serve his colonial subjects and imperial masters by pursuing programs that were advantageous to both. As Williams put it, he “sought to understand Virginia problems and to settle them in the best manner commensurate with imperial policies.”66 The two main issues that Gooch emphasized – tobacco inspection and defence improvements – illustrate the dual nature of his concerns. Government regulation of Virginia’s tobacco crop enhanced colonial incomes and English customs revenues alike. Stronger coastal defences and a more potent militia both guaranteed the security of Virginians and supplemented British war

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efforts. Such measures worked for Virginia’s benefit and, at the same time, satisfied Gooch’s superiors in England. The success that Gooch achieved in advocating these policies demonstrates the effectiveness of his approach to governing. After a prolonged battle on both sides of the Atlantic, Gooch instituted a program of tobacco inspection that lasted for several decades. The adroit manner in which he was able to manoeuvre his measures safely through the political maze in London is testimony to the governor’s mastery of imperial politics. Gooch’s expert presentation of his tobacco plan to Virginia planters, London merchants, and imperial administrators illuminates his considerable political talent. He knew how to frame his arguments in a way that highlighted the benefits for all parties involved. The tobacco act was, indeed, designed “to do Justice to His Majesty, the Merchant and the Planter.”67 Although the governor’s efforts to win support for his defence proposals were not as productive as his promotion of tobacco inspection, they still show his ability to take advantage of an intersection of imperial and colonial interests. Virginians were reluctant to provide funds for defence, and they rejected several parts of Gooch’s military program. Nevertheless, they enacted militia reform, they supplied men and money for the Cartagena expedition, and they supported a planned attack on Canada. Each of these measures benefited the people of Virginia and the empire as a whole. Tobacco regulation and military improvements certainly appealed to groups on both sides of the Atlantic. However, inspection can be seen primarily as an attempt to do something for Virginia, while defence spending can be viewed mainly as an attempt to do something for the empire. Tobacco inspection illustrates what the governor did for the colony and sold to imperial interests. The debate over defence improvements exemplifies what Gooch did for the empire and sold to Virginians. He was definitely more active in cultivating support for the tobacco act than he was in urging the colonists to adopt the measures that he thought were needed for imperial defence. This suggests that Gooch was more willing to push colonial concerns in Britain than to work for the empire in Virginia. Gooch’s governorship also reveals a great deal about the nature of colonial administration. The home government’s attitude toward the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century has sometimes been characterized as one of “salutary neglect.” Imperial officials were largely indifferent to the colonies except as they provided a source of offices that could be used to reward their loyal supporters in Britain. However, as Ian Steele notes, “[t]he British Empire was not neglected and government preoccupations were not always salutary”

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under the Walpole-Newcastle ministry.68 Some historians have argued that the steady increase in the number of American positions controlled by British administrators fatally weakened the political influence of the provincial governors by eroding their appointment powers. According to this view, colonial governors had trouble maintaining their authority because they did not control the patronage necessary to build effective blocs of government supporters.69 Gooch’s experience in Virginia offers a different perspective. His administration suggests that one of the keys to a governor’s authority was, in fact, to avoid the political pitfalls associated with forming a “court” party based on patronage. Gooch’s campaign for tobacco inspection also indicates that a governor whose appeal was based largely on policy grounds could flourish in an empire tied together by patronage. Although Gooch had powerful connections in Britain to shield him from political enemies on both sides of the Atlantic, his policies had a similar protective quality. His policy initiative on tobacco regulation united Virginia planters and overseas merchants in a transatlantic coalition that sustained his political program. Even in a contentious arena like the tobacco trade, Gooch brokered a community of interest between the planter elite, London merchants, and Crown officials. In securing the passage of his tobacco plan, Gooch also showed a willingness to give up patronage in exchange for sound policy. Although Virginia’s place bill limited the political usefulness of the offices at the governor’s disposal, this loss of patronage did not undermine Gooch’s position because he was able to attain his political aims through other means. He forged an alliance with influential planters in Virginia not by giving them advantageous offices, but by pushing measures that matched their interests. The decline of the patronage at Gooch’s command did not detract significantly from his authority because he was capable of achieving his goals primarily through persuasion and favourable legislation, not through his powers of appointment. Gooch’s administration demonstrates that a governor who relied on the promotion of sound policy to win political support could still achieve success in the English Atlantic empire.

notes 1 R.A. Brock, ed., The Official Records of Robert Dinwiddie (New York: ams Press, 1971), vol. 1, 2. 2 Gooch’s formal rank was actually lieutenant governor. Until 1737 George Hamilton, Earl of Orkney, was absentee governor of Virginia during Gooch’s tenure. Orkney remained in Britain and had no active involvement in Virginia

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affairs. His successor, William Anne Keppel, Earl of Albemarle, also had little interest in Virginia, except for occasional forays into the realm of colonial patronage. Because Gooch exercised all the powers of governor, he will be referred to in this essay as “governor” rather than “lieutenant governor.” Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, Westward Expansion and Prelude to Revolution, 1710–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 500, 503; Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, ny: KTO Press, 1986), 234–42, quotation at 234; Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, 14–76 (New York: Norton, 1976), 38; Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992), 127. The most complete examinations of Gooch’s governorship are Percy Scott Flippin, “William Gooch: Successful Royal Governor of Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 5 (1925): 225–58; 6 (1926): 1–38; Andrew Karl Prinz, “Sir William Gooch in Virginia: The King’s Good Servant” (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1973); Frank W. Porter, “Expanding the Domain: William Gooch and the Northern Neck Boundary Dispute,” Maryland Historian 5 (1974): 1–13; Paul Randall Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative: Three Royal Governors in Virginia as a Case Study, 1710–1758” (PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980); Karl Tilman Winkler, “‘The Art of Governing Well’: Virginia’s Governor William Gooch, the Role of the Colonial Executive and the Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 29 (1984): 233–75. The internal politics of Virginia during Gooch’s administration are explored in David A. Williams, Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia Politics, 1698–1750 (New York: Garland, 1989). For an overview of the politics of empire during this period, see Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown, eds, Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675–1775 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970). See Stacy L. Lorenz, “‘To Do Justice to His Majesty, the Merchant, and the Planter’: Governor William Gooch and Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1727–1749” (hereafter “Anglo-Virginia Politics”) (MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1993); Stacy L. Lorenz, “‘To Do Justice to His Majesty, the Merchant and the Planter’: Governor William Gooch and the Virginia Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730” (hereafter “Virginia Tobacco”), Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108 (2000): 345–92. Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 47–50; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 356–8. Prinz, “Sir William Gooch,” 1–10; Alison Gilbert Olson, Anglo-American Politics, 1660–1775: The Relationship between Parties in England and Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 132; Olson, Making the Empire Work, 128; John M. Hemphill II, Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1688–1733:

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Studies in the Development and Fluctuations of a Colonial Economy under Imperial Control (New York and London: Garland, 1985), 207. Olson, Anglo-American Politics, 132; David Alan Williams, “Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1690–1735,” in Olson and Brown, eds, Anglo-American Political Relations, 88. Only the secretary of state, not the Board of Trade, could appoint and dismiss a colonial governor. However, the board could make a governor’s job extremely difficult by rejecting his nominees for office, openly encouraging his enemies, and recommending that the Privy Council disallow provincial legislation. On the role of Bladen and the Board of Trade during this time, see Olson, Anglo-American Politics, 128–35. Olson, Making the Empire Work, 128; Alison G. Olson, “The Virginia Merchants of London: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Interest-Group Politics,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 40 (1983): 363–88 at 381. Newcastle became southern secretary in 1724. During his first years in office, he played a subordinate role in overseeing colonial affairs but by the early 1730s was the key English official in the administration of the American colonies; see James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 3–23; Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 77–8. Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615–1753 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 76–7; Williams, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 88; Olson, Making the Empire Work, 128. Beginning in the early 1730s, Newcastle’s influence was instrumental in securing various appointments for Thomas Gooch. In return, Thomas worked hard to cultivate support for Newcastle and his younger brother, Henry Pelham, who served as prime minister from 1746 to 1754. Letters from Thomas to Newcastle can be found throughout the Newcastle Papers. Most of the correspondence between the two concerned the subject of church patronage, as Newcastle regularly sought Thomas Gooch’s opinion when it was time to fill the numerous church offices at his disposal. On appointments to church positions and posts at Cambridge, see, for example, Thomas Gooch to Newcastle, 5 Feb. 1733, The Papers of the Duke of Newcastle, British Library Additional Manuscripts (hereafter Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss.) 32689, files 156–7; Bishop of Bristol to Newcastle, 1 April 1738, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32691, file 105; Bishop of Norwich to Newcastle, 16 June 1743, 23 April 1744, 29 April 1746, 21 Aug. 1746, 16 May 1747, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32700, files 219–20; 32702, files 379–80; 32707, file 116; 32708, files 124–5; 32711, file 61. On Newcastle’s role as Thomas Gooch’s patron, see, for example, Thomas Gooch to Newcastle, 15 Aug. 1734, 10 Oct. 1734, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32689, files 353 and 453; Bishop of Norwich to Newcastle, 26 Jan. 1748, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32714, file 117. On Thomas Gooch’s dedication to Newcastle and his family, see, for example, Thomas Gooch to Newcastle, 6 Sept. 1733,

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Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32688, file 281; Bishop of Norwich to Newcastle, 2 Nov. 1746, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32709, file 158. William Byrd II, quoted in Joseph C. Robert, The Story of Tobacco in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), vii; Gooch to Board of Trade, 27 Feb. 1731, Colonial Office (hereafter co) 5/1332, Public Record Office, London, files 149–52. The state of the tobacco economy and fluctuations in tobacco prices are discussed in Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, esp. 5– 148; Russell R. Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617–1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 109–77. For an overview of earlier attempts to improve conditions in the tobacco industry, see Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 350–6, 361–3. For a more detailed analysis of Gooch’s campaign for tobacco regulation, see Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 6–46, and “Virginia Tobacco,” 345–92. Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 152–3. Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 239. Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 10; Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics,” 38. See also Olson, Making the Empire Work, 127–8. Gooch to Board of Trade, 29 June 1729, co 5/1322, files 11–12, 24–5; Gooch to Board of Trade, 7 Sept. 1729, co 5/1322, files 124–5; Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 133, 135. Gooch to Board of Trade, 23 July 1730, co 5/1322, files 53–7. See also Gooch to Board of Trade, 29 June 1729, 29 May 1730, co 5/1322, files 11–12, 140–1; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 363–5, 371–3, 375–8. Gooch to Board of Trade, 27 Feb. 1731, co 5/1322, files 149–52. Between 1723 and 1730 the Assembly tried to inhibit production by limiting, or “stinting,” the total number of tobacco plants that each worker could raise. The stint law of 1728, for instance, limited slaveholders to 6,000 plants per worker, while nonslaveholders could grow up to 10,000 plants each; see William W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, 1619–1792, 13 vols (Richmond and Philadelphia: Franklin Press, 1809–23), vol. 4, 87–9; Waverly Winfree, ed., The Laws of Virginia, Being a Supplement to Hening’s The Statutes at Large, 1700–1750 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1971), 247–53, 295–305; Gooch to Board of Trade, 9 Aug. 1728, co 5/1321, files 74–5; Gooch to Board of Trade, 23 July 1730, co 5/1322, files 53–4; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 66–72, 93–5, 150–1, 158–9; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 354–5. Gooch to Board of Trade, 29 June 1729, co 5/1322, files 11–12. Olson, “Virginia Merchants,” 363–88; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 360–1, 365–6. On Micajah Perry, his family, and their influential mercantile firm, see Elizabeth Donnan, “Eighteenth-Century English Merchants: Micajah Perry,” Journal of Economic and Business History 5 (1931): 70–98; Price, Perry of London.

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24 Mr Leheup to Board of Trade, 22 Feb. 1731, co 5/1322, files 96–7; Gooch to Board of Trade, 9 April 1730, co 5/1322, files 147–8; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 153–4. 25 Board of Trade, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations Preserved in the Public Records Office, 14 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Printing Office, 1920– 38), vol. 6, 181. Although a group of merchants, including Perry, later seems to have worked behind the scenes to encourage the Board of Trade to overturn the inspection act, it is clear that many London tobacco merchants continued to support Gooch’s plan. See Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 371–6; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 85–7, 94–5, 149–50, 153–4, 159–66, 173, 303; Olson, “Virginia Merchants,” 381; Price, Perry of London, 80; Jacob M. Price, “The Excise Affair Revisited: The Administrative and Colonial Dimensions of a Parliamentary Crisis,” in Stephen B. Baxter, ed., England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763, 257–321 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 271–3, 276–7. 26 Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1727–1734, 1736–1740 (hereafter jhb) (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1910), 57. 27 Gooch to Board of Trade, 27 Feb. 1731, co 5/1322, files 149–52. See also Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, 423–4. 28 Gooch to Board of Trade, 23 July 1730, 27 Feb. 1731, co 5/1322, files 53–7, files 149–52; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 366–9. 29 McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 82; see also 60–2, 65–6, 70, 73–6, 78–80, 82, 100, 103–4. 30 Gooch to Board of Trade, 27 Feb. 1731, 10 May 1731, co 5/1322, files 149– 52, files 172–4. See also Williams, Political Alignments, 232; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 238; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 154–6. 31 Gooch to Board of Trade, 23 July 1730, co 5/1322, files 53–4; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 238; Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Legislative Journals of the Council of Virginia, 3 vols (Richmond: Colonial Press, Everett Waddey Co., 1918–19), vol. 2, 768, 771, 776; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 160. 32 Board of Trade to the King, 19 May 1731, co 5/1366, files 31–6. 33 Gooch to Board of Trade, 18 July 1732, co 5/1323, files 43–8; Williams, Political Alignments, 245–6; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 291, table 3.1. See also Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 241, 244; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 113, 116; Flippin, “William Gooch,” 243; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 301–5. 34 See Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 108–13; Williams, Political Alignments, 241–5, 281–92; Hemphill II, Virginia and the English, 168–70; J.C. Rainbolt, ed., “The Case of the Poor Planters in Virginia under the Law for Inspecting and Burning Tobacco,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 79 (1972):

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37 38 39

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314–21; Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 36–44; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 378–88. Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 369–70; Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 4, 292–3, 481–2; vol. 5, 10–11; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 62–3, 70, 72–5, 80–3; Williams, Political Alignments, 273–5, 281–7. Under the 1730 law, a member of the House named as an inspector could be reelected after his constituents were informed of the appointment. In 1736 inspectors were excluded entirely from the Legislature. In 1738 the Burgesses completely removed the governor from the appointment process by transferring his right to appoint inspectors to the county courts. Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1712– 1714, 1715, 1718, 1720–1722, 1723–1726 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1912), xxi-xxiii, 47, 54–5, 58, 60–1, 65–6, 68, 73; Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 32–3; Lorenz, “Virginia Tobacco,” 351–4. Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 31–3. Alexander Spotswood, Spotswood Letters, Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, n.s., 2 vols (New York: ams Press, 1973), vol. 2, 49. Williams, Political Alignments, 141–4, 149–52, 159–65; Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 36–42; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 107; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia, 181. Williams, Political Alignments, 164. Ibid., 167–77, 207–8; Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 81, 125. Stanley Nider Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1968), 12. See also Henretta, “Salutary Neglect,” 32–5, 107–34, 165, 199–221, 268–72. For an opposing view of Newcastle’s conduct of colonial administration, see Philip Haffenden, “Colonial Appointments and Patronage under the Duke of Newcastle, 1724 to 1739,” English Historical Review 78 (1963): 417–35. On the broader context of patronage in British politics, see Eveline Cruickshanks, “The Political Management of Sir Robert Walpole, 1720–42,” in Jeremy Black, ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole, 23–43 (London: Macmillan, 1984). Henretta, “Salutary Neglect,” 33, 110, 220–1. Some of these positions were particularly attractive because the officeholder could remain in Britain while the job was executed by a deputy. Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 51–73; Williams, Political Alignments, 252–3, 256, 259–64; Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, 506–7. Although the governor’s formal approval was required for appointments to several positions, the naval post was the only office of value at his command. The governor appointed the clerks of the Council and the House of Burgesses, but Gooch labelled these posts “a mere trifle.” After 1723 the position of secretary of state of Virginia was sold in England to the highest bidder. The secretary had a large number

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of offices at his disposal, including the clerks of the county courts. In addition, the governor played no role in the selection of the three officials in charge of colonial finances. The deputy auditor and the receiver general were chosen by the auditor general of customs for the plantations living in England. The treasurer was elected by the House of Burgesses, and the position usually went to the unpaid Speaker as compensation for his onerous responsibilities. Finally, the patronage value of such local posts as justices of the peace, sheriffs, and militia officers was limited. See, for example, Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 179–81; Williams, Political Alignments, 248–52, 265, 273–9. I am indebted to John M. Murrin for suggesting this perspective to me. See, for example, McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 7, 20, 28, 60, 106, 117, 119–20, 164–5, 179, 242, 246–7, 325. See, for example, Gooch to Newcastle, 16 June 1730, 19 July 1731, 24 Nov. 1734, 19 July 1735, 11 Jan. 1737, co 5/1337, files 138, 151–2, 168, 179, and 187; Gooch to Board of Trade, 14 March 1734, 20 Nov. 1734, co 5/1323, files 107 and 149–58. Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 15–17, 74–105. Williams, Political Alignments, 284, 286–7; Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 75–7. Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 5, 16–24; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 327, 333, 338, 343–4, 348, 353, 362–3, 365, 386; Gooch to Board of Trade, 22 Feb. 1739, co 5/ 1324, files 156–61; Williams, Political Alignments, 292. Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 79–88. McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 394. Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 5, 90–4; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 394–5, 401, 407, 411, 416, 418, 421–2, 427, 429–30, 434. Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 5, 94–6; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 424, 429–32, 434; Gooch to Board of Trade, 29 Aug. 1740, co 5/1325, files 18–29; Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin Hilman, eds, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 5 vols (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1925–67), vol. 5, 6; Morton, Colonial Virginia, vol. 2, 526–7, 532; Gooch to Newcastle, 2 May 1740, co 5/1337, files 230–1. Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 5, 121–3; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 437–42; Gooch to Newcastle, 30 Aug. 1740, co 5/1337, files 228–9. McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 434. Gooch to Board of Trade, 26 May 1740, 10 Aug. 1740, co 5/1325, files 2–3 and 9; Instructions to Gooch, 5 Jan. 1740, co 5/1337, files 218–22; Newcastle to Gooch, 2 April 1740, co 5/1337, files 226–7; Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740– 1742 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1991), 37, 39, 42–7, 75, 89–93; Prinz, “William Gooch,” 45–9; William A. Foote, “The Pennsylvania Men of the American Regiment,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 87 (1963): 31–8.

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59 Harding, Amphibious Warfare, 3, 72, 83–149; Prinz, “William Gooch,” 51. 60 Lorenz, “Anglo-Virginia Politics,” 91–102. 61 There were two main sources of revenue for the Virginia government during this period. The first, administered by the governor and Council, was based on the permanent revenue of 2 shillings per hogshead on tobacco exports, 1 shilling and 3 pence (15 pence) per ton on ships coming to Virginia from abroad, and 6 pence per poll on persons brought into the colony. The other source of funds was controlled by the entire Assembly, but in practice, this meant the House of Burgesses, as all money bills originated there. This revenue was generated by the taxes on imported liquors and slaves and disbursed by the treasurer. See Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 2, 466–9; vol. 3, 345, 491; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, xxiii. 62 Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1742– 1747, 1748–1749 (hereafter jhb, 1742–1749) (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1909), 4. 63 Ibid., 75, 98, 131, 134, 138, 145. 64 Ibid., 98–9. 65 Hening, ed., Statutes, vol. 5, 401–4; McIlwaine, ed., jhb, 1742–1749, 226–30; Williams, Political Alignments, 313. 66 Williams, Political Alignments, 224. 67 Gooch to Board of Trade, 27 Feb. 1731, co 5/1322, files 149–52. 68 Henretta, “Salutary Neglect,” 107, 134–8; Ian K. Steele, “The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire, 1689–1784,” in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, 105–27 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115. 69 Henretta, “Salutary Neglect,” 242–5, 259–61, 346–7; Shrock, “Maintaining the Prerogative,” 179–81; Williams, Political Alignments, 248–52, 265, 273–9.

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The Maritime Atlantic

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6 William Crashaw’s Bridge Bermuda and the Origins of the English Atlantic, 1609–1624 n e i l k e n n e dy

In 1624 Captain John Smith began his chronicle of the short history of Bermuda’s settlement with a telling aphorism: “for as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion, so History without Geography, wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.”1 Smith’s borrowed wisdom suggests he understood that the character of colonial society as it developed in Bermuda would depend very much on the compelling limitations and advantages of landscape and spatial location. In subtropical Bermuda’s case, the influence of geography was all the more important because both the circumscriptions and the apparent bounty of the tiny archipelago were so visible, and also because both appear to have been so readily comprehended by its first inhabitants. Here, the dramatic interpenetration of land and sea suggested the degree to which English settlement in Bermuda would be tightly keyed into the transporting water beyond. Pulled outward by that sea, Bermudians were from the earliest days drawn into social and economic interaction in the North Atlantic world. Within a generation of settlement, Bermuda was to some observers the quintessential English Atlantic island, one in which the frontiers of opportunity necessarily lay on the edges of the ever-visible Atlantic. If in the 1620s the rough contours of an English Atlantic world of communication and community already were being formed, it was likely in Bermuda that those contours were first becoming clear. It also may have been on Bermuda’s early success that an English Atlantic first depended, rather than on the inchoate impulses of West Indian settlement still guided by war and by the Guiana colonization project on the southern continent. Similarly, Bermuda’s characteristics and

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location provided a coherence that remained elusive in the mainland American colonies, where local political economies continued to depend on indigenous knowledge rather than on imposed English geographies, and where into the 1620s Virginian expectations of tributary Indians were as fixed and fantastic as they were futile.2 If in 1624 Virginia’s indigenous Powhatan could be cast as the “confiners” of the English, and of English ambitions, Bermuda without a Native population, in contrast, was by then a key island stage, having secured an English New World presence from which further English ventures could be supported in what one commentator in that same year promisingly called “a goodly order.”3 Earlier, one advocate of Virginia colonization, William Crashaw, had optimistically praised the Atlantic as an ocean “bridge for men,” rather than as a barrier to expansion, and Bermuda may well have become the first fixed western pillar in that bridge.4 In 1624, as the Virginia Company collapsed in recrimination, the sister joint-stock investment company governing Bermuda survived another sixty years to become one of the longest lived English New World settlement companies of the seventeenth century, perhaps the only one to turn a steady if modest profit for its investors. Sharing with Virginia an economy centred on the export of tobacco, by 1624 Bermuda was the most densely populated, the most secure, and the best comprehended English space in the New World. Here, over the century’s course, in an early and reviving colony that was free from the adverse effects of competing claims to proprietorship, there gradually formed an Atlantic society made dependent by geography and environment on larger transatlantic networks of goods and peoples. This chapter argues, then, that Bermuda was the first English American colony in which both the outline and necessity of later developments in communication and community became clear. Between 1609 and 1624 the English perception of Bermuda transformed them from unfortunate to fortunate isles, recasting what was once distant and forlorn into a place that was both central and sustaining. The movement of goods, people, and ideas that came to bind together the seventeenthcentury Atlantic world in a broad web of interactions was in Bermuda’s case already encompassing intercolonial and international exchange by the 1620s, both by local initiative and by investors’ instruction. The archipelago’s size compelled an external perspective from the start, while its location provided a place in which the lessons of early English experience in the Caribbean could be adapted to the English American mainland. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Bermuda’s singular dependence on the intercolonial networks of the Atlantic World limited the colony’s importance to the metropole as much as it has limited historians’ attention to Bermuda’s place in that English Atlantic.

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Almost entirely ignored by scholarship on the English colonial Americas, Bermuda was the first English New World space that fulfilled the promises of the promotional literature. Here by 1624 was remarkable safety and reasonable abundance, and although “distant in region,” Bermuda was “yet united in religion, in nation, in language and dominion” within an English world of possibility and movement.5 The name “Bermuda” now evokes images of the exotic, the separate and distinct, an evocation arguably as true in the early modern period. In the sixteenth century the name signified the islands’ likely first discovery around 1505 by the Spanish mariner Juan Bermúdez, whose name became attached to the uninhabited islands permanently despite several counter ascriptions in that century and the next. The splayed cluster of islands of Bermuda appeared in circulated printed maps comparatively early on, by the 1530s, and although such maps showed little detail, they did illustrate tiny Bermuda’s strategic location. With a total land area of under 21 square miles, and a shoreline of over 100 miles, the island group lies in the vastness of the Atlantic roughly 3,500 linear miles from London, with the closest landfall some 600 miles to the west. For more than 100 years following its discovery, Bermuda existed in European nautical legend and popular imagination as the realm of the supernatural, as Dæmoniorum insulam, the Isle of Devils. There may have been an early Spanish interest in discouraging settlement in Bermuda, and thus in scattering tales of a legendary danger there, but French and Dutch vessels spread very similar stories. The islands’ isolation and tempests led Samuel de Champlain to ponder whether “heaven and earth must come together” here in a maelstrom that was to be noted and avoided. To Sir Walter Raleigh, and the English Elizabethan explorers, this place was a storm-wracked mystery, perhaps just this side of hell.6 The islands were known to European mariners as an important navigational marker of the northern terminus of the Florida Current, and they knew the very heavy toll that the islands’ deceptively far-flung reefs had taken on the ships returning to Europe from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. They were also aware that neither the Spanish nor the French had occupied these islands, the English believing that Europeans generally deemed the islands “more fearful than a Utopian purgatory,” rendered by hurricanes and reefs into “the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorne place in the world.”7 Periodically, tales from the survivors of shipwrecks gave shape to the legend, and as narratives of the desperation of shipwreck they did little to serve as enticements to settlement. Whether it was the relative influence of reputation or of reef, the Spanish restricted themselves to brief landings and quick

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surveys. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Bermuda’s sheltering coves were intermittently used by French privateers, who added their own brand of deviltry to Bermuda’s reputation by ambushing ships laden with New World wealth. Minor Iberian schemes for colonization in the 1520s, and for securing the islands against the French in the 1560s, never reached the islands’ shores. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the English were aware of the general pattern of these activities, if not the details, and both Bermuda’s location and its fearsome character were well known by those who ventured into the western Atlantic. In trying to encourage Queen Elizabeth in 1580 to pursue a strategic footing in the West, John Dee included Bermuda in his map of enticements. He did so as well when encouraging others with colonial designs upon the northern Atlantic, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The islands’ proximity to those increasingly busy shipping routes out of the Caribbean was as tempting to Elizabethan privateers as it had been to the French. If any demonstration of Bermuda’s future usefulness as a valuable companion to mainland ventures was needed, it came shortly thereafter, with Sir Robert Grenville’s 1585 capture of the Santa Maria de San Vicente. After landing the first English colonial expedition to Roanoke, Grenville sailed to Bermuda’s waters and seized this Spanish prize, so valuable that it reimbursed the entire cost of the first Roanoke settlement. Then in 1593 Henry May, an Englishman, spent five months on Bermuda with a shipwrecked French crew. May expressed surprise at finding the islands “so barren” of human occupation when they had such “great store” of food, although little water. His account was published very soon thereafter and now attached the surprising possibility of healthfulness to Bermuda’s already recognized strategic importance.8 The fearsome reputation of Bermuda’s waters and the renewed Spanish interest in the islands, however, continued to dissuade English attention, even though one of the lessons of Roanoke had been the necessity of a secure harbour. Henry May’s account tantalizingly declared that pearls were as abundant in Bermuda as anywhere in the Caribbean and noted the presence of a good harbour and plentiful swine left there by the Spanish both for provisioning ships and against the inevitability of future shipwrecks. What is most striking about May’s account, particularly in light of his own experiences before and after the Bermuda wreck, is the complete absence of indigenous peoples, including any trace of their past or seasonal use of the islands. Primed by Richard Hakluyt’s collections of exploratory narratives and by the so-called Black Legend of Iberian depredations, the English may well have believed that the lack of a native labour source discouraged Iberian interests in Bermuda. Yet it was equally true that the

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absence of indigenes was also a genuinely novel experience for the English and one further distinction of the place that May described. It is the tendency of empires to obliterate or subsume what came before, but in Bermuda’s case the most striking discovery for Europeans was the emptiness of the islands. The lack of an indigenous population in Bermuda, when compared to Roanoke and Jamestown, seemed to simplify the possibility of recreating settled agricultural society in the New World. Admittedly, in comparison to the American mainland, this absence limited opportunities for trade, foodstuffs, and local knowledge while mitigating against the coherence lent by long-term martial purposefulness in other colonies. In particular, however, Bermuda’s latitude and moderate seasonal temperature variation seemed to offer a more southerly answer to the unfavourable climate but favourable strategic location of the northern Atlantic islands with which the English were already familiar. Certainly, the treacherous currents and rocky shoals made Bermuda “feared and avoided of all sea travellers alive above any other place in the world,” as one castaway in 1609 put it.9 Yet it was also the case that islands were desirable locations for European settlement, not the least because they provided the most persistent navigational markers and the best ratio of land to shore for ease of transportation and communication. More important, small islands offered the most readily defended locations as well as the likelihood of containment of their inhabitants, attributes that provided the best circumstances for preserving both the latter’s safety and their Englishness.10 So striking was the apparent abundance of the place, and so clear was its apparent defensibility, that the English saw little need to puzzle over Bermuda’s emptiness. For those promoting colonial ventures elsewhere in the 1620s, that Bermuda was found “quite void of people” promised a considerable simplification of the process of colonization, for it negated the possibility of similar claims by prior occupation. Providentially empty and pleasingly abundant, Bermuda encouraged hopes that future spaces might yield in a manner that was reassuringly clear: “we seize upon it, take it, possess it and as by the laws of God and nations lawfully we may, hold it as our own.”11 Even Bermuda’s surrounding reefs may have been less unique an obstacle than historians have assumed. Certainly, they were fixed in location, and the two natural passages through the reefs appear to have been found by even the earliest European visitors, although their passage was difficult and easily defended. In comparison, the topographical features of New England’s coastline were continually modified by storms, creating a shifting chaos that matched the bewildering forest at its edge. Here, Bermuda as a comprehensible if dangerous space contrasted with New

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England’s irregular and wandering shoals, which Captain John Smith cautioned in 1616 created what was “still but even as a coast unknown and undiscovered.”12 Conceiving Bermuda as an English place began with the providential story of the Sea Venture passengers’ discovery of an island that was both less fearsome and more prodigious than had been supposed. On 2 June 1609 the nine vessels of the Virginia Company of London’s third supply fleet sailed for Jamestown with the colonists, supplies, and leadership needed to revive that flagging two-year-old plantation. The losses in personnel and enthusiasm in Virginia that had occurred since 1607 were compounded by a distressing inability to produce the promised commodities, western passages, or even traces of the earlier Roanoke colonists. Throughout the New World of English possibility, there existed the uncertainty of Iberian and Aboriginal retaliation for English encroachment, while English domestic, religious, and political questions seemed at times to vitiate the very impulses that had energized Elizabethan exploration. It appeared to some of those involved in overseas projects that English adventurers had proceeded to the New World with unrealistic assumptions, meeting with unfulfilled expectations and with the increasingly problematic technical questions of colonization.13 Nonetheless, the 1609 fleet set sail buoyed by abundant optimism, invigorated by renewed and broadened investment, and supported by a new expansive royal patent intended to clarify authority in the colony and to allow for the better containment of Virginia Company settlers. In this context, then, the apparent disappearance in a storm of the expedition’s flagship, the Sea Venture, bearing Virginia’s intended governor, the leading gentry members of the fleet, and two returning Amerindians, was a portentous loss that for a year virtually becalmed the increasingly defensive Virginia Company. Yet the Sea Venture’s passengers had not been lost at all, although their fate was not known in England for a year. Wrecked at the eastern end of Bermuda, all 150 lives had been preserved miraculously by the reputed skill of the fleet’s admiral, Sir George Somers. The story of their passage from tempest to haven, and their subsequent sojourn on Bermuda for ten months amid evidence of abundance and ease of life, has been told often since.14 The “wondrous preservation” of the passengers and crew revived the Virginia Company, which promptly recast the drama for popular consumption as a “tragicall comaedie” and a demonstration of the “direct line of God’s providence.” In other accounts, divine guidance and miraculous rescue complement the islands’ uninhabited and salutary state. The problematic matter of the harrowing storm that crippled the

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Sea Venture was glossed with a reassurance to prospective migrants that the danger was minimal: “heaven was Pylotte in this storme.” Here, the surprising realization of Bermuda’s true state seemed to be the essence of what the tireless promoter of English colonization Richard Hakluyt had earlier insisted was necessary if “these laste luckye westerne discoveries” were to be seized before they were lost to rivals.15 The loss of the Sea Venture generated a pivotal revitalization of English colonial activity, and for some observers it occasioned fulsome assertions of England’s American destiny. Alongside plantations in Ireland and Virginia, Bermuda’s misnamed discovery in 1609 was characterized immediately as one of the “manifolde tokens and signes of the infinite blessings of Almightie God bestowed upon this Kingdome.”16 As Jamestown’s situation worsened through the 1610s, a rhetorical emphasis on honour and temperance, rather than on profit and glory, seemed the sensible course given that even the colony’s own secretary referred to the Virginia settlement’s progress as “contemptible.”17 Now, the celebratory and providential literature associated after 1610 with Bermuda buoyed hopes for English success in Jamestown by means of association with the providential survival in Bermuda, while the absence of indigenes rendered moot the disappointing steps made in fulfilling the missionary impulse in Virginia. From the Sea Venture accounts, colonialists learned of the natural defences provided by the outlying reefs, which accorded well with English expectations that island colonies provided the most appropriate landscape for protection, ease of establishment, and accommodation to the environment. Freed from sailors’ characterizations of their mysteriousness, the very “mustering winds” that had once shrouded Bermuda’s true “naturall endowments” could be expected to safeguard from invaders those now safely harboured within: “Nature it selfe being herein readie to further their securities against the greatest forren force.”18 Existing metaphors associating islands with purification and with the stimulation of experience within familiar bounds also encouraged optimism about the restoration in Bermuda of English overseas ambitions. The healthy ten-month sojourn seemed to offer a resounding answer to apprehensions about survival on small islands, concerns that paralleled those about survival on shipboard during transoceanic passages. The reports suggested as well that Bermuda’s location a full four degrees south of Jamestown perhaps presented the much anticipated opportunity to secure a replacement for Iberian sources of subtropical commodities, such as silk, pineapples, citrus fruits, melons, figs, cotton, indigo, and sugar, each of which was experimented with in Bermuda’s first decade.19 The substantial redirection of English investment and attention from Jamestown to Bermuda that prevailed for the

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first half of the 1610s was to some extent foretold by the fortuitous arrival in Jamestown of the Sea Venture’s passengers, who brought with them vital food supplies. The promise of a safe source of supplies in Bermuda particularly attracted the attention of Virginia Company investors, “who rightly apprehended the aydefull vicintie of the place” to Virginia, even those who did not necessarily imagine colonization in Bermuda itself at this point. By 1611 the company proposed establishing a fort in Bermuda prior to settlement, “finding it verie convenient for a strength to Virginia.” Carried on an optimistic current, the investors soon enlarged the scheme to planting a colony, concluding that “the place is so opulent fertile and pleasant that all men were willing to go hither.”20 The close association of Bermuda with Virginia became reality in 1612 when a subsidiary colonization venture of the Virginia Company sent the first English settlers to Bermuda. The year and a half that had passed between news of the Sea Venture’s fortunes and the departure of the colonists gave time for the revival of investments in colonization, which had flagged with the news of the earlier ship’s disappearance. The partial separation of Bermudian investments from the larger body of Virginia sponsors also provided a significant opportunity for ascription, an opportunity of which the subsidiary company clearly was conscious. After a month’s deliberation, the venturers resolved to name the territory the Sommer Islands, as much “in respect of the continuall temperate ayre” as both to honour and to harness the reputation of the mariner Sir George Somers, who had died there. Adopting the more salubrious title for the plantation and occasionally using Summer for Somer also indicated an important symbolic rejection of any century-old claims by right of discovery that might be allied with the isles’ Spanish discoverer.21 For a generation, the serendipitous realization of the Isle of Devils’ true nature led even normally cautious observers to suggest that in Bermuda “there may seeme to be a restauration of that Golden Age so much spoken of.” Phineas Fletcher, musing in Cambridge on the Old World’s inability to contain what he called the “ambitious light” of English Protestantism, cast Bermuda as both the vindication and the culmination of the Protestant colonial enterprise: “That stormy Ile which th’Ile of Devills hight, / Peopled with faith, truth, grace, religion / What’s next but hell? That now alone remains.”22 Not all accounts were so generous, however, and in this period occasional colloquial jeers claimed that the colonies of the New World were mere refuges for the dissipated or impecunious. For a short time in the mid-1610s, the word “Bermuda” was applied in a few scattered references to the area of new development around Covent Garden in London, a supposed refuge of

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debtors and cutpurses. The appropriation of “Bermuda” for an unruly new outpost within London itself mocked the colonial advocates’ exploitation of yeoman patriotism and commercial ambition by denigrating the character of colonization. But the reference also suggests how the distant and exotic could be made local and familiar, while its quick disappearance from use perhaps suggests the persuasiveness of the triumphalist statements about Bermuda’s providential stage in English New World destiny. Some of this early geographical misapprehension even further muddled the distinctions between the new and the old: writing in 1620, a Flemish pilot named Simon Zacharias, resident in Bermuda for six months between 1612 and 1615, misidentified the sole Bermuda town of St George’s as being called “New London.”23 Despite the overwhelmingly radiant literary associations that the Sea Venture story inspired, Bermuda shared much the same range of experiences, tensions, and developments as other English colonies in the New World. Slow, indeed, was the process of creating an AngloBermudian society in which settlers willingly engaged in productive activity in a consensual social and political environment, particularly as much of the promised early abundance proved to be either nonexistent or quickly overexploited. Still, transferring English legal forms to the colony, gradually expanding religious institutions and personnel, and inaugurating a representative legislative assembly in 1620 brought relative stability to the colony, even as these instruments limited some of the opportunities available to the colony’s settlers. As the newly revived castaways in Shakespeare’s The Tempest explore their own formerly mysterious Bermuda-like island, one remarks that in the surprisingly fertile land that they had discovered, “here is everything advantageous to life,” to which comes the answer, from another who lived in expectation of European disbursements, “true; save means to live.”24 It was this search for the means to live as one had anticipated – that is, beyond the merely material – that sent Bermudians beyond their shores. Bermuda’s small size presented more long-term economic problems than most English colonies faced, but its achievement of social and political stability in the early 1620s and its low mortality seem to have attracted and retained colonists with little active promotion from the investors, despite the ready opportunities elsewhere. Butler praised the “exceedinge excellent salubritie of the ayre,” which made disease “wonderfully rare and uncommon here, except it by in shypeing times,” recognizing that Bermuda’s Atlantic attachments periodically came with a steep price. Associated as it was with the Sea Venture discovery of a fertile Bermuda, this lasting reputation for healthy airs was an inspiration early on for advocates of colonial ventures, particularly

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while the miasmic marshes around Jamestown created demographic disaster in that place. In 1624 Richard Eburne noted encouragingly that the Bermuda islands had been found healthy and with “no harmful thing in them” at all, and he assured his readers that what had been found once must surely be found again elsewhere.25 Those same attributes of healthy environment and location would make Bermuda by the 1630s a sickbed for ailing colonials, from Caribbean planters to such notables as the New England divine Michael Wigglesworth. The islands’ pleasing climate attracted some early English colonials who had extensive Caribbean experience, like Captain John Powell, who insisted that he preferred Bermuda “above all others.” Men like Powell, who were “sufficient and able Marriners,” were particularly important: while they came to Bermuda for its unusual qualities, they brought connections and expertise that helped to moderate the novel experiences of every colony.26 Even during this formative period in the early English Atlantic, the maritime traffic through geographically isolated Bermuda was at times remarkable. Between 1612 and 1649 a minimum of two to three English and foreign vessels arriving per year are mentioned in the extant records, and the numerous gaps suggest that the actual figure was considerably higher. Soon after his arrival in the colony in 1619, Nathaniel Butler closed the assize court hurriedly and returned to the town of St George’s “to be nere to the continuall occasions of the shyps,” and he recorded the subsequent arrival of four Dutch ships within a period of two to three months. A shipwrecked Spaniard noted the arrival of one vessel from Virginia and another from New England within days of his own shipwreck in 1639 and the docking of a Bermuda Company supply ship not long thereafter. He remarked that Bermudians were quite familiar with the seasonal round of maritime comings and goings.27 Another Spanish traveller, previously a captive in Virginia, wrote of Bermuda that the English “do not cease talking of the excellence of that island and its advantages.” He noted that in contrast to Virginia, Bermudians “get along very well in that colony because they have little need of England,” Bermuda being so fertile and promising. Further, Bermuda provided an opportunity that had so eluded the English on the American mainland: a high degree of security that could be maintained by relatively few able men.28 Much depended on the fortuitousness of Bermuda’s location astride the principal navigational route coming from the south to the north and east as well as on the advantage of its proximity to America’s eastern seaboard. For instance, Thomas Punt, master of the Charity for the Providence Island Company, brought passengers to Bermuda in 1632 after a circuitous route from London that exposed Bermudian settlers

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and returnees to as many as seven other colonies, knitting together a world of interest and information by such exposure. This location brought together commerce, communication, and the circulation of persons, giving rise to such remarkable occasions as the marriage of the two maids of Pocahontas to Bermudian men at an extraordinary ceremony in 1621 – 100 Bermudian, Virginian, and Dutch guests celebrated the union in a “full and fashionable manner,” probably alongside shipwrecked Spaniards.29 Subsequent generations of Bermudians became founding members of English colonial enterprises throughout the Atlantic, taking their colonial expertise to places like St Kitts, Providence Island, and Barbados as well as providing kinship and credit ties to the skilled mariners of Bermuda. As he addressed the reduced Virginia Company fleet heading to a disconsolate Jamestown in the summer of 1610, before the Sea Venture’s fate was known, the Puritan divine and Virginia Company member William Crashaw described the ocean passage as “so safe, so secure, so easie, as though God himself had built a bridge for men to passe from England to Virginea.”30 With Crashaw and others having asserted the essential unity of English spaces in the Atlantic, the accounts in the promotional and popular literatures describing the survival of the Sea Venture’s passengers in 1609 could be used to transform a near tragedy into a providential bridge, with Bermuda as the bastion that revived Jamestown in 1610. The heady confidence of Crashaw and others in the comforts of the sea passage was of course a promotional tool. However, despite the very real dangers of the Atlantic passage, Crashaw’s confidence may have been closer to the lived experience of his generation than we think, at least as suggested by the ready movements of Bermuda’s first generation, buoyed by the early profitability of tobacco. After a generation of settlement, Bermuda’s residents appear to have been the most mobile English population in the western Atlantic, with higher rates of remigration and multiple passages both to England and to other colonies than those recorded for any English colonial population during the 1630s.31 Earlier, during the 1620s, Bermudians returned to England to visit kin, to conduct business, to take the waters at Bath, and to publish and petition – several doing so more than once – and by the 1630s they had travelled to the Caribbean, the Chesapeake, and New England to inspect investments, to purchase goods, and of course to settle. This spontaneous mobility on routes to the south and west suggest that there was some popular truth to Richard Eburne’s claim in 1624 that travelling by sea, compared to land, was “rather the easier and pleasanter of the two.”32 The sheer density of people on the circumscribed landscape became one of Bermuda’s most compelling seventeenth-century features and

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provided the essential impetus for searching beyond the islands’ shores. Within a decade of settlement, the press of people on Bermuda’s roughly 6,000 arable acres created a remarkable population density for an English community. There were some 85 people per square mile in 1622 and 140 by 1640, resulting in limited average landholding and few ownership opportunities for indentured servants completing their terms. By the end of the 1620s, the governor’s council was encouraging young men to take employment on passing merchant ships heading for the Caribbean and was not encouraging them to return quickly, “ther being no land for them to be settled upon” in Bermuda. Within a further generation, Bermuda was actively barring new immigration to the crowded colony, although kin, colonial officials, and commercial associates continued to arrive in small numbers thereafter.33 The continued emigration of Bermudians from the first generation on has usually been taken as a sign of the economic limits to the place and thus as a marker of the relative lack of success of the colony. Yet it is also the case that these betterment migrations to the Caribbean and American mainland created the linkages of kinship and affiliation that facilitated operation of the highly social world of maritime commerce. From the perspective of London, Bermuda’s investors saw from the earliest period that intercolonial trade and relations were an essential element of Bermuda’s future, a vital adjunct to settled agriculture. In granting a seven-year relief to the newly formed Sommer Island Company on trade duties and royal tariffs, the royal patent of 1615 specified that the Company was to provide all things necessary to Bermuda’s colonists “for trading with our people, or with the Savages in Virginia.” The company itself then pointed the way to circum-Atlantic possibilities when the following year it instructed the colony’s new governor, Daniel Tucker, to direct the ship on which he had arrived to go to the “Savage Islands,” or Bahamas, “to trucke there for such thinges as are fitt,” which is an apt description of Bermudians’ fitful but determined early trade in the Caribbean. This trade was to include “sundrye thinges wch is hoped he shall get for the Plantacon, as Cattle[,] Cassadoe[,] Sugar Canes, negroes to dive for pearles, and what other plants are there to be had.”34 Although few details are known, Tucker experimented with Caribbean trade, and when he fitted out a vessel for trade to Virginia, he presumably relied on his prior commercial experience in the Chesapeake Bay.35 Before overpopulation and partial deforestation took their toll, Bermuda’s mild climate provided a surplus of food that could be readily carried to other English settlements, fulfilling the interdependence of trade and colonization implied by the 1615 charter. In 1621, as Bermuda

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shipped 20,000 pounds of potatoes and 20,000 ears of corn to Jamestown, Governor Nathaniel Butler noted what he rightly imagined was the inauguration of Bermuda’s regular provision trade within the Atlantic sphere when he wrote: “Our plantation commenceth a commerce unto you.” When this ship from Bermuda brought to Jamestown critical supplies, as well as the offer to ship 100,000 more ears of corn, the Virginia Company announced the fulfilment of the early expectations that Bermuda would be a revitalizing companion to Virginia. Acknowledging Bermuda’s role in mediating between Caribbean and American spaces, the company celebrated the arrival from Bermuda of “Vines of all sorts, Orange and Leman trees, Sugar canes, Cassado root (that make bread) Pines, Plantans, Potatoes, and sundry other [West] Indian fruites and plants, not formerly seene in Virginia, which begin to prosper very well.”36 Bermuda’s shipment of local produce included live ducks and turkeys, and the vessel was ballasted with local limestone, a useful building material that Bermudians later took to numerous colonies, leaving architectural traces along with kinship and commerce. From this encouragingly early start, Virginia joined in Butler’s celebration of the beginnings of regular intercolonial trade, sending a vessel to Bermuda shortly thereafter that was laden with European goods and Virginia bricks to sell and that was expected to return carrying Bermuda’s products: “plants and herbes of all sortes, potatoes, ducks, turkeyes, and lime-stone.” Similarly, the Virginia government turned to Bermuda for supplies when famine appeared to loom once again in Jamestown in the spring of 1623.37 The Sommer Islands Company and individual investors repeatedly offered instructions and encouragements for whaling ventures from Bermuda to the south and west, which also drew Bermudians away from the shores as much as the company generally wanted to keep Bermudians’ trade contained. One commentator in 1617 thought that the plentiful whales were sent seasonally by “God for our triall,” luring “our Fisher men” seaward by their bountiful presence.38 Despite persistent hope and considerable effort, local whaling remained a minor enterprise for Bermudians. Yet the colonists had gained a small reputation as whalers by the end of the century and were drawn to other whaling waters along the North American coast. Those experienced administrators and colonial agents who, like Daniel Tucker, strongly influenced the colony’s early development also recognized the importance of a maritime orientation. In 1620 Governor Butler advised the colony that “botes, next [to] fortification, are the most important, beneficiall, and useful instruments that thes Ilands can possibly have,” and he worked to expand the number of small vessels during his tenure. From the earliest days, the colony’s records illustrate the determination of many planters to secure sails and cordage

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for their boats and indicate that many engaged in near-shore fishing to supplement both their diets and their income.39 In other ways, too, the sea rewarded those who looked outward from Bermuda’s shores. The treacherous reefs continued to be a serious hazard to passing ships using the islands for navigation, and within three years of the colony’s founding, salvaging wreckage had become an important part of many colonists’ livelihoods. Such was the eagerness of Bermudians to indulge seaborne opportunities for earthly goods and exotic windfalls that one shipwrecked Spaniard characterized the colonists as “a flock of voracious vultures circling the sky in search of a cadaver.”40 Just as the earlier shipwreck victims had salvaged what remained in order to escape the islands, now Bermudians salvaged the material wrecked by others as a means to escape the colony’s constraining size. By the early 1630s Governor Roger Wood privately observed that “our neighbouring plantations flock to us” for the colony’s relative social and political stability or to trade for its surplus production of foodstuffs.41 As the economy diversified into mixed husbandry through mid-century, Bermuda’s excellent exposure to prevalent shipping patterns encouraged Bermudians to undertake similar provisioning ventures to the south and west, although provisioning would bring environmental stresses similar to those that tobacco export had introduced. The Sommer Islands Company’s taxes on trade between Bermuda and England provided one further impetus for the expansion of Bermudian commercial interest into the Atlantic seaboard and the Caribbean. Since tiny Bermuda’s environment was stressed so quickly by rapid settlement, Bermudians were quickly drawn outward, just as mainland colonists were drawn inland for resources and land. In most mainland colonies, intercolonial and transatlantic trade were interlinked, but in Bermuda’s case the early attachments made to the south and west, combined with the company’s impositions, by necessity immersed Bermuda more heavily in intercolonial networks. Some sense of this world of movement built by individuals seeking “opportunities of advanceing their estates, wch in other pts of our dominions might possibly occur to them,” is suggested by a proclamation that has received very little attention from Atlantic historians: in 1641 Charles I clarified his position that no colonial governor in the island colonies could “lymitt or restrayne” the movement of free subjects, thereby ensuring the continuation of an interisland mobility that had been created by the many actions of early Bermudians.42 Serendipitously empty and providentially fertile, Bermuda was rapidly settled and equally rapidly demarcated as activity was redirected there from Virginia during the early 1610s. After a decade of settlement, two

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published illustrations of Bermuda served to promote interest in the colony and to represent the geography of a place heavily imprinted with the signifiers of a complete English possession. Even an earlier unpublished survey made by Sir George Somers during the Sea Venture sojourn joyfully illustrated the abundance of swine, birds, fish, and whales discovered by the accidental visitors in 1609. The name given on that survey to part of Bermuda, “Pearle Islands,” suggested the direction of Somers’s interests and proved persuasive to his fellow Virginia investors. Although he was initially sent to Bermuda to dive for those elusive pearls, the land survey undertaken by Richard Norwood in 1617 and drafted by 1622 was a palpable testament to the evolution of the colony from company project to individual endeavour as export agriculture replaced the search for easy riches. Norwood’s exacting survey, widely distributed in 1627 in John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World and frequently reprinted thereafter, became a standard map of Bermuda during the seventeenth century and was arguably one of the finest achievements of Jacobean cartography.43 In a period of marked European rivalry, when mapped claims bolstered often tenuous possession, the authoritative detail of Norwood’s elaborate survey was a significant marker of English presence in the New World. The survey marks the division of the islands into shares of land and, on them, a scattering of houses, churches, and clusters of settlement, the whole assemblage pinned down by the English names that connected Bermuda to the eastern Atlantic. This was a signal of possession made more demonstrative by the enumeration of the landholders’ names along the bottom panel of the map, guarded to either side by the twin seals of the Sommers Island and Virginia Companies. This alliance of topographical mastery with corporate purposefulness illustrated the coherent achievement of the Bermuda project. Norwood’s map illustrated the islands’ strategic importance by clearly positioning an oversized Bermuda between Virginia and New England, with the Spanish island of Hispaniola to the south. In this way, Bermuda already appeared as a mediating space between the three regions, a strategic role that the islands would play in subsequent centuries. Just as revealingly, Norwood’s map did not locate England in relation to Bermuda, forecasting the direction of the ties that Bermudians would choose to make later in the seventeenth century. Intended primarily for the scrutiny of the shareholders, Norwood’s map lacks the illustrative vignettes and indigenous scenes of contemporary colonial maps, emphasizing instead a settled and familiar quality as well as the authenticity of the representation. Similarly, Captain John Smith’s famous compendium of original, plagiarized, and borrowed narratives, which were welded into a general

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history of colonization in the New World to 1624, turned also with considerable wonder to the Sommers Islands. Like Norwood, Smith marvelled at Bermuda’s eventful settlement, noting its coherence and rejuvenating inspiration: “a man would thinke it a tabernacle of miracles, and the worlds wonder” to have surmounted all obstacles, and indeed to Smith the place was a veritable “Paradise of admiration.” The map of Bermuda contained in Smith’s Generall Historie was based on a simplified version of Norwood’s survey and is surrounded by twelve important illustrations of Bermuda’s public buildings. The town of St George’s is here displayed as an orderly progression of dwellings, civil structures, churches, roads, and appurtenances. In Smith’s illustration, the absence of Amerindians, their dwellings, or their nomenclature stands in stark contrast to the more speculative and figurative maps of Virginia and New England also included in the Generall Historie. That powerful absence further signalled the Englishness of what its promoters had recast as the “Summer Isles,” while the protecting circle of illustrated fortifications suggested that as a result of Bermuda’s defensibility, “England was not easily to be excluded from the advantages of the new world.”44 The map that was included with Smith’s history played a different and supplementary role than that filled by Norwood’s survey. Smith’s flattering pictorial achievement was not so much an illustration of individual possession as a testament to community and corporate achievement. Like other scattered mainland outposts to this point, Virginia exhibited few hallmarks of lasting settlement and continued to face disparaging reports of the lack of development, bitter points that were deployed in the factional disputes of the Virginia Company.45 Aside from settled demographic and administrative features, Bermuda in contrast had by 1624 a comprehensive survey, permanent stone civic structures, substantial stone defensive works, and a series of convenient bridges linking the dispersed colonists across the archipelago. Bermuda also attracted a wealth of complementary accounts, all of which drew important narrative strength from the transformative Sea Venture story. Unlike Norwood’s map, the one produced by Smith did not bear the company crest, but his praise for Bermuda’s achievements and the certainty in English permanent presence signalled by his illustrations telegraphed the company motto, “Quo fata ferunt” (here the fates take us). John Smith’s Generall Historie, with its history and map of Bermuda, proved to be nearly as popular as the printed map based on Norwood’s survey and was in its sixth edition by 1631. From his potent map and his detailed narrative, it is clear that Smith was influenced by Governor Nathaniel Butler’s earlier thoughts on the colony that he had just

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departed. Praising “this good and happy place, floweing with milck and hony,” Butler’s own scriptural evocation testified to the successful adaptation of English agriculture and implantation of familiar stock by 1624. To Smith, the transformation resulting from the colonial advocates’ achievements made to 1624 was clear: “The Spaniard, French and Dutch have been lost and preserved in these Invincible Isles, yet never regarded them but as monuments of miseries, though at the present they all desire them.”46 Together, Norwood’s map of individual land tenure and Smith’s picture of corporate achievement diagrammed a possession that had been apprehended in its entirety. In name and feature, this was an English space, one that even included, in parallel to England, its own western and forlorn Ireland Island. These two maps contrast sharply with those, for instance, of Virginia, whose English inhabitants would take another two decades to conceive of an English Virginia that was not tightly bound to the political geography of the indigenous Powhatan.47 Having been cast in cheering terms of stability and achievement, Bermuda also served, then, as an encouragement for a host of new agricultural settlements in the Atlantic sphere in the period after 1612, to many of which Bermuda became connected by trade and kinship. The cautionary tales written at mainland beachheads like Avalon, Roanoke, Sagadahoc, early Jamestown, and the Guiana coast gave way to promising representations of stability and productivity in Bermuda. The initiatives of Bermudians both in engaging the trade of passing vessels of any nationality and in entering into trade with Virginia pointed the way out of the confinement of the colony’s size. Similarly, the Bermuda Company’s early directive to seek resources and labour in the hinterlands of the polyglot Caribbean suggested the investors’ own inability to contain the borders of the colony. The early attachment of the Bermuda investors after 1616 to the lucrative export duties on tobacco sustained the modest ambitions of the company to a greater extent than did the same pattern of development for the larger, distracted, and more disparate Virginia Company. Achievement of a well-regarded settled society in Bermuda built on a sound financial foundation preserved the investors from the royal scrutiny that swept away Virginia’s founding colonialists. If the dissolution of the latter group in 1624 appeared to suggest that colonization in the New World lacked a coherent footing and that corporate colony models were in disarray, Bermuda offered a powerful counterexample. Founded as a companion effort to Virginia and once regarded by some as an outwork and nursery of that place, Bermuda continued to orient itself westward to the American mainland and southward to the

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Caribbean, eschewing the lines of metropolitan-colonial communication, which prevailing winds made largely a one-way path. The diverse and disjointed English colonial worlds created by imaginative and bold circum-Atlantic activities early in the seventeenth century had by midcentury begun to take on a semblance of coherence, and although transatlantic enterprises remained diverse in nature and incompletely integrated, there were those who readily conceived of such integration. There were even promoters forecasting a particular kind of English Atlantic that emphasized correlation and contiguity rather than territory and separation. By the 1620s some, like the teacher John Brinsley, already imagined this nascent English Atlantic as part of a broad national project in which “Ireland, Wales, [and] Virginia, with the Sommer Ilands,” might be brought together by shared culture and experience and even by a shared curriculum.48 Brinsley’s assured belief in the extension of national principles of Protestant education beyond the British Isles is perhaps not so surprising at this stage. If the diary of Adam Winthrop of Groton Manor in Surrey tells us that the majority of early Jacobean Englishmen were parochial in their interests, it also tells us that, even for the insular-minded, places of English settlement could in time be readily conceived of as natural extensions of England. For instance, in parallel to Brinsley’s transatlantic education scheme, Richard Whitbourne declared in 1620 that there existed an essential sisterhood of English spaces and an essential unity in English projects, referring specifically to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Virginia, Bermuda, and the British Isles.49 Scotsman Patrick Copeland, who served as a distinguished nonconforming minister in Bermuda for twenty-one years from 1626 and who was also a former chaplain to the East India Company in Surat, held even more expansive notions of the potential connectedness of places, peoples, and ideas. Copeland proposed that thwarted proposals for a college for Amerindians and missionaries – to be fitted with Scottish instructors and modelled on techniques of conversion adapted from his observations of Jesuits and Dutch Calvinists in the Americas and Asia – be shifted from Virginia to Bermuda.50 Bermudians who emigrated to new colonies, circulating between Bermuda and property or opportunities in other places, and those free and enslaved Bermudians who by mid-century plied the western waters in fast sloops may well have been fulfilling some of these connecting ambitions. Those groups of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch mariners and merchants who from 1612 on came recurrently to the islands’ shores by various means, accidental or otherwise, along with those Africans, Amerindians, Irish, and Scots who found themselves brought to Bermuda over the course of the seventeenth century, exposed all Bermudians to a

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bold diversity of persons, projects, and energies that confirmed the outward gaze of a tiny colony that would by the end of the century be the general correspondent of the colonial Atlantic.51 Bermudians had entered this trade of their own initiative, building on patterns of trade and mobility established in the previous decades, and Bermuda’s mariners and merchants were well aware of their geographic advantage. While the length of the voyage to Bermuda from England created hardships, the return voyage was relatively quick and gave Bermudians an advantage in carrying news from the Caribbean, occasionally enabling them to “be the first to acquaint the King thereof.”52 By the turn of the century, the merchant captains of Bermudian-crewed sloops were generally “men who have visited most parts of the trading world,” but few held much contact with England after the Bermuda Company’s dissolution in 1684, beyond the steady purchase of English-manufactured goods that soothed mercantilist programs but did little to recommend Bermuda as a model colony.53 Treated with salutary neglect, in time the little island cluster slipped largely from the sight of those imperial officials who turned their attention to the emerging integration of the British Atlantic world. In 1688 the colony gained permission within the Navigation Acts to enter into intercolonial trade on enumerated commodities, an undertaking that the Bermuda Company had to the end succeeded in confounding but in which Bermudians had been engaged with increasing boldness since mid-century. Reviving eighty-year-old wisdom about Bermuda’s strategic location, England’s attorney general noted in 1683 that Bermuda lay “in the eye of all trade to the West Indies,” while in 1700 the surveyor general of customs for America, Edward Randolph, called Bermuda “the key to all His Majesty’s plantations.”54 With more than 100 vessels stopping annually at Bermuda by the end of the century, the islands also gained their reputation for possessing the “best intelligence of any place in America” by virtue of the energetic yearly routes of Bermuda’s own mariners.55 Such were the imperial eddies into which Bermuda was perceived to have slipped in the eighteenth century – at least from London’s perspective – that even new imperial descriptive literature revived an older understanding, distant and literary, of the small colony. John Oldmixon, for instance, thought it reasonable to recommend to his many readers Edmund Waller’s ethereal 1640s paean to a Puritan Bermuda haven. Admitting that Waller’s poem “tastes of Antiquity,” he thought that it remained “a very lively Idea of the country,” there having been “so little Acquaintance with, and Information of these Islands” in recent years. He insisted that the “Serenity and Beauty” prized in the early accounts remained intact and suggested that

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Bermuda existed still in “a Sort of perpetual Spring.” Nevertheless, this was also meant to imply suspended or truncated development, and Oldmixon diminished the old notion of Bermuda as a valued healthy refuge for ailing colonials with a dismissive recognition of the islands as a “safe and quiet Retreat from the Troubles and Cares of other Parts of the World.” From the perspective of his assertive imperial history, Oldmixon damned Bermuda’s Atlantic commerce as a mere “peddling Retail trade” that did little to improve Britain’s wealth, directed as it was to the west and south rather than to the east.56 For those who inquired or looked closely, the same configuration of antique imagery and acknowledgment of maritime mobility could be used to form a more positive impression of those currents of remigration and trade that drew Bermudians south and west but rarely east to Britain.57 In isolating those qualities that established the importance of individual colonies to Britain’s imperial wealth, Fayrer Hall cited Bermudians’ superlative maritime experience. Hall gave greater weight to the importance of intercolonial trade than did most commentators and noted the advantages that accrued to Bermudians from fast sloops, low freightage costs, and generosity to “Strangers.” But in sharing Oldmixon’s metropolitan frame of reference, Hall also characterized Bermuda as an imperial backwater, seeing there a people who were quaintly happy in their isolation yet whose “Industry and Frugality” provided little reward for London.58 In 1724 George Berkeley, dean of Londonderry, proposed founding a substantial seminary in Bermuda for the instruction of missionaries to the Americas and for the education of Amerindian students, thus reviving an idea of Patrick Copeland’s that had originated in Bermuda a century earlier. Spurning the sugar islands for their presumed licentiousness and luxury, Berkeley held that “the best information” indicated that Bermudians were “the only people of all the British plantations, who hold a general correspondence with the rest.” While this connectedness prompted his plans to locate the seminary there, Berkeley’s informants suggested that the colony recommended itself on the grounds of manifest tolerance and “humanity.” In this view, the economy’s modesty purportedly lacked the distractions of more impersonal and avaricious places. Although the proposal was derailed by the most prosaic circumstances (i.e., Berkeley’s sudden wedding), the patronage and royal warrant that his scheme attracted suggest something of the persuasiveness with which century-old notions of Bermuda as a haven could retain currency alongside recognition of the islands’ circum-Atlantic connections.59 Berkeley specified that it was Bermuda’s extensive associations with the American mainland and its relative lack of direct contact with England that suggested the colony as a site. In

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this characterization, Bermuda illustrated the case that high levels of communication and information were possible even for remarkably small places – communication that was in Bermuda’s case self-directed along intercolonial, rather than imperial, lines. This twin image of Bermuda’s geographic separation and immersion in the Atlantic world was not confined entirely to the English world. A half-century after Berkeley’s proposal, the changeable Frenchman J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur used quite similar imagery in narrating a two-month sojourn in Bermuda by his “Itinerant Man.” Here, in capturing the outline of this “sort of Archipelagus,” Crèvecoeur ascribed the same virtues to Bermuda’s reefs as had the very earliest English descriptions. The natural barriers and thundering sea were still at once ominous and reassuring, for “in this appearant Havock of Nature their Greatest sécurity” was found. For Crèvecoeur’s sojourner, Bermuda’s Atlantic vista compelled the same sort of external orientation as had been felt by generations of Bermudians, and he found himself “gazing now & then with an Involuntary amasement on the great Circumjacent ocean.” The “surrounding Element” that readily drew the narrator to Bermuda on a common merchant route thus belied the seclusion suggested by his “geographical view” of such an “Isolated Society.” As in Berkeley’s scheme, here the symbolic twinning of separation and connection conjured an Atlantic Bermuda, a place at once geographically apart but accessible as well as preserved by its remoteness in “Frugality Moderation & Peace.”60 Although Crèvecoeur, like Oldmixon and Berkeley, perpetuated an image of a rustic and virtuous Bermuda that was of dubious accuracy, their characterizations do suggest the continued currency of older ideas of a Bermuda that was in the eye of all trade rather than lying separate from the English Atlantic world. This Bermuda, one intimately connected to the social world of maritime commerce and intercolonial interests, has scarcely been recognized by historians of the colonial English Atlantic. Despite frequent claims of transatlantic or hemispherical comprehension, early Americanists by and large still ignore early Bermuda as they look past the Sommer Islands to future prosperity elsewhere and to the continental interior. Two very recent self-described “Atlantic” studies simply erase Bermuda from their maps of the English colonies.61 Yet if the slow accretion of early settlements might be conceived of as adding “islands in a spreading English archipelago,” then the movements and connections built between those colonies are a vital part of understanding the context within which English colonies developed in the seventeenth century.62 Still, after four centuries, the scholarship on England’s secondoldest permanent settlement in the New World remains remarkably

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thin. Neither part of the Caribbean nor a true continental outlier, Bermuda’s geographical separation has resulted in resistance to the islands’ incorporation into regional studies. During the initial phases of European investigation and expansion into the western Atlantic, tropical and subtropical islands provided the first novel experiences, offered the most recurrent navigational points of reference, and became some of the first colonies. However, there has been a powerful tendency to suppose that small islands – and, indeed, small colonies of any kind – were mere preludes or episodes in an imperial expansion perceived to have had its fulfilment in continental developments.63 There were those in the first quarter of the seventeenth century who imagined that the westward enterprise would proceed in this manner as well, but at least in 1624 island colonies appeared to offer an integrity, coherence, and permanence that mainland footholds seemed then to lack. Of course, the justifications for perceiving Bermuda to be entirely peripheral to the early modern American colonies have not been simply geographic but lie also in the smallness of the place and in the economic circumscriptions that size entailed.64 Largely based on the ready measures of exports and shipping frequency to England – an imperial scale by which small Bermuda would always be deemed subordinate –- Bermuda has been relegated to the category of colonies with truncated economic development. From this perspective, seventeenthcentury Bermuda was not simply an economic failure, but also an irrelevant failure. This has seemed to be the case because Bermuda no longer produced any “considerable Commodity” of its own by the eighteenth century, although it continued to hold out hope for the success of staples from more southerly islands: sugar, ginger, indigo, and cotton.65 With the prevailing measure of success in the eyes of imperial agents being principally agricultural rather than maritime, the income from seaborne trade on which Bermuda depended frequently slipped through the net of imperial observation; the network of kin emigrants undergirding this trade was seen as a loss rather than as a commercial advantage.66 Yet by the end of the first generation of English colonial experiments in the Americas, Bermuda was the most cogently bounded, most surveyed, most densely settled, safest, and best comprehended space in the English New World. If for a time the Sommer Islands were a byword for settled success, this was due largely to the connections that Bermudians were forging themselves among the scattered outposts to the west and south as well as due to their participation as seasoned colonists in founding ventures from Barbados to Providence Island. If, indeed, land divided and water united, Bermuda – perched on the edge

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of the wide, calm Sargasso Sea – was perhaps the ideal location for those who by their movements and connections gradually built and crossed William Crashaw’s bridge. Writing from Bermuda in 1614, the Welsh minister Lewis Hughes called upon English men and women to “come hither as it were into a new world, to lead a new life.”67 Much about settlers’ lives in seventeenth-century Bermuda was indeed novel, but much also seemed increasingly familiar, and all such lived experience was defined by a transforming ocean that was rarely out of sight or mind.

notes 1 John Smith, “Book Five,” in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), reprinted in Philip Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, vol. 2, 338–91 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 338. Smith’s aphorism is taken from Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage (London: Wm. Stansby, 1613), 44. 2 Such was the case in John Martin’s neofeudal scheme of 1622, which the Virginia Company endorsed as “not improbable”; see John Martin, “How Virginia May Be Made a Royal Plantation,” in Susan Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 3, 707–10 (Washington, dc: Government Publishing, 1933–38); John Appleby, “English Settlement during War and Peace, 1603–1660,” in R. Paquette and S. Engerman, eds, The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, 86–104 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 3 J.F. Fausz and J. Kukla, “A Letter of Advice for the Governor of Virginia, 1624,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 34, no. 1 (1976): 104–29; quotation in Richard Eburne, A Plaine Path-Way to Plantations (London, 1624), 4. 4 William Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London before the Right Honorable the Lord Lawarre … (London, 1610), E1 verso. 5 Eburne, Plaine Path-Way, 11. 6 Many of the early descriptions are extracted in John H. Lefroy, ed., Memorials of the Discovery and Settlement of the Bermudas, 3rd ed., 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). For popular English references to a frightful Bermuda, see E.H. Sugden, Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (London: Hildesheim, 1924), 58. Champlain, cited in David Quinn, “Bermuda in the Age of Exploration and Early Settlement,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 1 (1989): 1–24 at 11; R. Barreiro-Meiro, “The Bermuda Islands and Juan Bermúdez,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 13 (2002): 7–18; Margaret Palmer, Printed Maps of Bermuda (London: Map Collectors’ Circle, 1965). 7 Commenting in 1624, Barbour, Works of John Smith, vol. 2, 348.

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8 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), vol. 3, 573–4; David Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), vol. 1, 219–22; vol. 2, 787–8. 9 G.V. Scammell, “The English in the Atlantic Islands, c. 1450–1650,” Mariner’s Mirror 72, no. 3 (1986): 295–317; K.R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1984); quotation in William Strachey, “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” printed in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625; reprint, Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905–07), vol. 19, 5–72, 13. 10 John G. Reid, “European Expectations of Acadia and the Bermudas, 1603– 1624,” Histoire Sociale-Social History 40 (1987): 319–35; John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 11 Eburne, Plaine-Pathway, 96; Alfred Cave, “Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire,” American Indian Quarterly 12 (1988): 277–97. 12 John Smith, quoted in John Stilgoe, “A New England Coastal Wilderness,” Geographical Review 71, no. 1 (1981): 33–50, 33. 13 Such issues of colonization included the royal persecution of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, the collapse of the Sagadahoc colony in 1608, and Spanish pressure on James I to abandon Jamestown; see Neil Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society in the English Atlantic World, 1609 to c. 1701” (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2002), 1–107. 14 The standard account of the Sea Venture’s arrival in Bermuda is Wesley F. Craven, An Introduction to the History of Bermuda (1938; reprint, Bermuda: Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 1990); see also, more recently and imaginatively, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 8–35. 15 [Council for Virginia], A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), 17–20; R. Rich, Newes from Virginia: The Lost Flock Triumphant (London, 1610), 4; Richard Hakluyt, Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), ed. David Quinn and Alison Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, extra series, no. 45, 1984), lines 1687–8. 16 Edmond Howe, The Annales of Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1615), 945. On the popularity of the Sea Venture stories, see John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965), 202–6. Michael Craton argues that English tropical colonization “symbolically began with the hurricane wreck” in Bermuda; see his “Reluctant Creoles: the Planter’s World in the British West Indies,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Strangers in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, 314–62 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), 322.

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17 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Letter of John Pory to Sir Dudley Carleton, 1619, in L.G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625, 283–5 (New York: C. Scribner, 1907), 283. 18 Quoted from a brief account of Bermuda written around 1616, probably by the first governor, and printed by Samuel Purchas in 1625, reprinted in Lefroy, ed., Memorials, vol. 1, 104. 19 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 20 Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States, 2 vols (Cambridge, ma: Russell and Russell, 1890), vol. 1, 495, 560, 680; Nathaniel Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes of Summer Islands, ed. J.H. Lefroy (London: Hakluyt Society, 1882), 17; David Quinn, “Advice for Investors in Virginia, Bermuda and Newfoundland, 1611,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 23, no. 1 (1966): 136–45. On the transfer of attention to Bermuda as an adjunct to Jamestown, see Craven, Introduction, 20–3, 53. 21 John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 1612, in Norman McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, 334; Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 23–69. 22 Richard Norwood, “Insularum de la Bermuda Detectio” (1622), reprinted in Champlin Burrage, ed., John Pory’s Lost Description of Plymouth, 3–65 (Boston: Houghton, 1918), 13; “Stanza 29,” in The Locusts or Apollyonists (Cambridge, 1627), reprinted in Frederich Boas, ed., The Poetical Works of Giles Fletcher and Phineas Fletcher (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1908), vol. 1, 136; there is substantial evidence to suggest that this paean was first written and circulated in 1611–12 at the height of the 1609 shipwreck’s renown, but the whole was reworked three times before publication (vol. 1, xvi). Aspects of the promotional literature and its historiography are explored in Neil Kennedy, “The Significance of Tempest Allusions in the Work of John Taylor the Water Poet,” Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History 11 (1999): 25–38. 23 Edward Harris, “The Town of St George’s,” Maritimes: Quarterly Magazine of the Bermuda Maritime Museum 9, no. 2 (1996): 8–9. 24 This passage follows the often cited probable Bermuda allusion to Prospero’s isle as “uninhabitable and almost inaccessible”; see William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Norton, 1959), act 2, sc. 1, line ll, 48–9, and line l, 38. 25 Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 205; Eburne, Plaine-Pathway, 25. Karen Kupperman explores why such a discovery was important in “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 41, no. 2 (1984): 213–40. 26 Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 228–9, 315–16; S.G.W. Benjamin, The Atlantic Islands as Resorts of Health and Pleasure (New York: Harper, 1878),

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32 33

34 35 36

37

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161–78. On Powell, see Nathaniel Butler to Sir Nathaniel Rich, 1620, in Vernon Ives, ed., The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615–1646, 182–3 (Bermuda: Bermuda National Trust, 1984), 182. Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 156; Joan de Rivera, “Shipwrecked Spaniards 1639 Grievances against Bermudians,” trans. L.D. Gurrin, Bermuda Historical Quarterly 18 (1961): 13–28 at 17; Lefroy, ed., Memorials, vol. 1, 721–42; Virginia Company, A Note of the Shipping, Men and Provisions Sent and Provided for Virginia (London, 1622). Letter of Don Diego de Molina, 1613, in L.G. Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625, 218–24 (New York: C. Scribner, 1907), 219. At least five Spaniards remained of the seventy wrecked earlier that year; see Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 271–2, 284. Crashaw, A Sermon Preached, E1 verso. Data summarized in Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999), 196–201; with additions made in Neil Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 120–3. Eburne, Plaine Path-Way, 111. On the 1628 appeal to male emigrants, see Colonial Records, vol. 1, 118v, Bermuda Archives; on later efforts to confront the problem of overpopulation, see Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 108–47. Reprinted in Lefroy, ed., Memorials, vol. 1, 92, 115, 117, 120. Butler, Historye of Bermudaes, 78, 85, 97, 112, 277, 285. Ibid., 30, 285; quotations in Butler to Francis Wyatt, 2 December 1621, in ibid., 277, original emphasis; Virginia Company, Note of the Shipping. In 1625 Governor Woodhouse reported the magazine ship’s departure for Virginia “furnished wth sundrye Plants and foules such as the Somer Islands yeilds, for the benefitt of that plantacon”; in Lefroy, ed., Memorials, vol. 1, 341. Bermuda proved unsuitable for sugar cane. Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 283–4; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860– 1919), vol. 1, 42–3. On continued ties between the two places in the second half of the century, see Philip A. Bruce, Economic History of Seventeenth Century Virginia (New York: P. Smith, 1935), vol. 2, 328n1; April L. Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 138, 174. Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 88, 92, 285, 256; Ives, ed., Rich Papers, 6, 36, 38, 138, quotation at 13. Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 186; Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 228–65. Rivera, “Shipwrecked” 15; Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia, mo: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 148–90. Letter 10, [c. 1632], Roger Wood Letterbook, Bermuda Archives.

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42 Charles I, Royal Proclamation, Whitehall, 20 June 1641, quoted from version entered December 1641 into Bermuda Colonial Records, vol. 2, 59–60, Bermuda Archives. 43 Rebecca Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 93–112; Margaret Palmer, The Mapping of Bermuda: A Bibliography of Printed Maps and Charters, 1548–1970 (London: Holland Press, 1983). 44 Craven, Introduction, 22. Craven’s theme of Bermuda as a fortified outpost guarding expansion has only rarely been explored; see C. Walton Brown, “Colonising Bermuda – Defending Virginia,” History Today 39 (1989): 36–41. 45 “Parts of Drafts of a Statement Touching the Miserable Condition of Virginia” (1623), in Kingsbury, ed., Records, vol. 4, 174. 46 Butler, Historye of the Bermudaes, 177; Smith, “Book Five,” in Generall Historie, reprinted in Barbour, ed., Complete Works, vol. 2, 390. Other than a brief and accidental approach by a Spanish vessel in 1613, repulsed with much anguish by the Bermudians in an episode that was itself written into Bermuda’s providential history, there were no direct threats to Bermuda in this period, but the fear of attack was real enough; see Craven, Introduction, 20–3. 47 April L. Hatfield, “Spanish Colonization Literature, Powhatan Geographies, and English Perceptions of Tsenacommacah/Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 2 (2003): 245–82. 48 Nevertheless, to be sure, this statement by Brinsley did not mean that he viewed these various peoples as equals; see John Brinsley, A Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles (London, 1622), 14–15. 49 On Winthrop, see Nicholas Canny, “Fashioning ‘British’ Worlds in the Seventeenth Century,” Pennsylvania History 64, supplement (1997): 26–45; Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (1620), 2nd ed. (London, 1622). 50 On Copeland’s Atlantic vision and late-century empire, see Nicholas Canny, “The Origins of Empire,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, 1–33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19; Patrick Copeland, Virginia’s God Be Thanked (London, 1622); Patrick Copeland, A Declaration How the Monies Were Disposed (London, 1622). Roger Wood wrote that Copeland “hath Travelled farre” and “long, twice to the East Indies,” but noted that having landed in Bermuda, he “will not remove to any pte of the world from hence”; see Letter 14, 1633, and Letter 34, 1634, Roger Wood Letterbook, Bermuda Archives. 51 Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 349–62. This turning outward may have mitigated the effects of Euro-American conflict, as Bermudians’ high maritime mobility provided information and warning about war, which were of great value to other colonies as well; see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 55.

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52 Nicholas Trott to Daniel Finch, 1690, in Historic Manuscripts Commission, Report on the MSS of Allan George Finch (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913–22), vol. 2, 384. Steele, English Atlantic, 55; Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 308–48. 53 Governor John Bruce Hope, 1725, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. 34, 69. On this detachment from Britain, see Henry Wilkinson, Bermuda in the Old Empire, 2nd ed. (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1958), 237. 54 Opinion on Bermuda, 1683, in Colonial Office 1/51, no. 117i, Public Record Office, London; see also a similar opinion attributed to Colonel Thomas Culpepper, in Add. MSS 16,370, 125, British Library; Edward Randolph, 1700, in Colonial Office 37/3, file 46, Public Record Office, London. 55 Wilkinson, quoting an eighteenth-century source, in Bermuda, 20. 56 John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (1708), 2nd ed. (London: J. Brotherton, 1741), vol. 2, 449–50, 456–7, 453–4. In 1685 Nathaniel Crouch, writing as Richard Burton, had included Waller’s poem as a sufficient account of the “excellencies” of Bermuda; see his The English Empire in America, 7th ed. (London: For Nathaniel Crouch, 1728), 157. 57 Ian K. Steele, “Time, Communications and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702,” Journal of American Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 1–21 at 13. 58 Fayrer Hall, The Importance of the British Plantations in America to This Kingdom (London: J. Peele, 1731), 82, quotations at 112–13. 59 George Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, 2nd ed. (London, 1725). For the impressive warrant, see Add. MSS 36,126, 244; Add. MSS 36,125, 260–7; and Add. MSS 39,311, 63, British Library. On the earlier scheme, see A.C. Hollis Hallett, Chronicles of a Colonial Church: Bermuda, 1612–1826 (Bermuda: Juniperhill, 1993), 310. 60 “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermuda and Other Subjects” (1773), in Dennis D. More, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crevècoeur, 106–13 (Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 109. A French version was published in the original, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Lettres d’un cultivateur americain (Paris, 1784), 229–40. 61 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001), excludes Bermuda both from the text and from the maps on which it should probably appear (71, 279), and amazingly, in the one map of the American colonies in which the archipelago is visible (26), it is not identified. Bermuda is similarly absent in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds, The English Atlantic World, 1500– 1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), xiii. 62 Christopher Tomlins, “Law’s Empire: Chartering English Colonies on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” in Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne, eds, Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, 26–45 (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2001), 26; see also Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia, esp. 86–109.

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63 Although he notes that Bermuda was crucially placed for the carrying trade, the assumption that islands represent stages, not ends, still organizes Donald Meinig’s The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 161–3, 224–30. 64 Dated but still useful is A.C. Hollis Hallett, Bermuda in Print: A Guide to the Printed Literature on Bermuda, 2nd ed. (Bermuda: Juniperhill, 1995). 65 Oldmixon, British Empire, vol. 2, 453. Typical of most, Jack P. Greene uses the term “stasis” to describe Bermuda’s economy by the end of the 1600s; see his Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 152. 66 Kennedy, “Anglo-Bermudian Society,” 308–62. The importance of “invisibles” such as freight and insurance in seaborne trade is central to Michael Jarvis, “‘In the Eye of All Trade’: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Virginia, 1612–1800” (PhD thesis, College of William and Mary, 1998). Jedediah Morse, in his influential The American Geography (Elizabethtown, pa: S. Kollack, 1789), concluded from this lack of agriculture that Bermudian men were simply indolent, although criticism led him to admit that the men were generally seafaring in his The American Universal Geography (Boston: I.T. Andrews, 1793). 67 Lewis Hughes, A Letter Sent from the Summer Islands (London, 1615), 10.

7 Forests of Masts and Seas of Trees The English Royal Forests and the Restoration Navy1 sara morrison And floating forests paint the waves with green … With joyful pride surveys’t our lofty woods; Where towering oaks their growing honours rear And future navies on thy shores appear. A. Pope, Windsor Forest (1713), lines 216, 220–2

On the night of 18 October 1662 a storm created havoc within the Forest of Dean’s oak and beech woods. By the next morning thousands of timber trees lay strewn about the forest. John Evelyn, a diarist and noted member of the Royal Society, recounted the events of the storm, which affected a large part of southern England. Evelyn described “such a storm of hail, thunder and lightening, as never was seen the like in any man’s memory, especially the tempest of wind being south-west, which subverted besides huge trees, many houses.”2 Returning to Sayes Court in Kent, Evelyn began repairing his house “miserably shattered by the late tempest.”3 Venturing out on the morning after the storm, Samuel Pepys, a navy commissioner and diarist, found the streets of London full of “brick battes and tyeles flung down.”4 The extraordinary strength of the overnight storm not only damaged buildings, but also raised tiles from the rooftops. The “extraordinary Winde” was still a current topic at Pepys’s coffee shop, where he met with others on 25 February to talk about the effects of “this great wind.” He had already received reports from the Forest of Dean, estimating the loss to be at least 1,000 oaks and a similar number of beech trees in a single walk, or division, of the forest.5 Daniel Furzer, the naval shipwright

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working in the forest, had taken stock of the damage to Dean’s prime naval woods. Reporting to Commissioner Pepys, Furzer believed that the windfall losses from the single storm totaled 3,000 trees.6 Since the end of the first Anglo-Dutch war (1652–54), Furzer had represented naval interests within the forest, regularly sending Dean’s timber trees to the London dockyards; he was also responsible for establishing a royal dockyard at Lydney.7 The windfall damage and loss of so many prime timber trees was a significant blow to the navy. Generally storms and windfalls in Dean and other royal forests were not extraordinary events but natural hazards more likely to afflict mature over-aged trees and those already compromised by disease. The Forest of Dean had experienced a similar, yet smaller, event in 1634.8 The royal survey of Dean’s timber woods between 1661 and 1662 revealed numerous old trees, some older than 300 years. Although many were generally in good condition, they were considerably older than the 80 to 100 years preferred by the navy when selecting mature timber oaks.9 The 1662 storm uprooted some of these older, more vulnerable trees in the Forest of Dean. In March 1662 Furzer expressed his concerns over the loss of wind-fallen trees; he also warned of future problems and noted the importance not only of protecting the fallen trees from theft, but also of finding honest workmen to square the timber for naval use.10 The devastation wrought on Dean by the storm of 1662 served as a graphic reminder of England’s vulnerability, especially due to its reliance on the navy’s wooden walls to protect its liberty, trade, and supremacy of the sea. Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry of Aylesborough, Worcestershire, later Lord Coventry, has been credited with coining the term “wooden walls” in a speech to the Judges of England in 1635: “The wooden walls are the best walls of this kingdom.”11 Those wanting to protect the security of the country through a strong navy aptly seized upon the term after the Restoration. For John Evelyn, national security became synonymous with England’s ability to build and maintain its “wooden walls.” The experience of the first AngloDutch War showed that spasmodically the navy relied on royal forest timber, notably when traditional supplies from the Baltic were unreliable. Although England was not at war with the Dutch in February 1662, as a domestic forest supplier to the navy, the Forest of Dean was the finest “jewel” within a small but highly treasured store of naval timber.12 Throughout the seventeenth century, the Forest of Dean was by far the most important royal forest to provide timber for naval use (see fig. 7.1).13 On a larger scale, the storm damage to Dean’s giant timbers was not as serious as the threatened Spanish invasion of the forest had been in 1588.14 Whether that threat was real, it had a lasting effect.

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Stories of the Spanish Armada and of the 1662 storm in Dean served as a rallying cry for gentry and gentlemen to plant their estates with timber serviceable to the nation. A small but assured source of timber for the navy, the woods of England’s royal forests clearly required protection and preservation, and there was need for a revival of woodland practices throughout the country. Preservation in seventeenth-century terms refers to the protection of timber through good management and is comparable with modern views of conservation. The 1662 storm and the damage that it caused to English woods hit a raw nerve for John Evelyn and others in the circle of the newly formed Royal Society. Following the general waste of woods and losses of timber sustained during the Interregnum, the Navy Board was highly sensitive to the management of woods and protection of the country in the early Restoration years. The finest and most popular expression of this view appeared in the work of John Evelyn, the royalist author of Sylva (1664). Evelyn’s preface inspired gentry to plant their estates with acorns and saplings and to develop nurseries of trees suitable for naval use, thereby protecting England’s security.15 He heavily popularized the idea of the wooden walls of the navy defending England and her trade. The reception of this work was a testament to the desire for changes in the management of woods and for the protection of the country with an increased navy.16 In 1662 so greatly did Samuel Pepys and other members of the Navy Board prize the timber in Dean’s woods that only days after the storm, Daniel Furzer, the naval purveyor based in the forest, was gathering up the fallen acorns. While planning to collect at least another 60 bushels of acorns, Furzer complained in frustration to the navy commissioners that many of the acorns were already sprouting.17 He wanted advice on how to proceed. Despite Furzer’s efforts scrambling about in the forest collecting acorns and protecting naval interests from theft and embezzlement, time was not on his side. For Evelyn, the storm of 1662 also represented the wrath of God. It was a sign of “God’s hand against this ungrateful and vicious nation and court.”18 For others in the Forest of Dean, the storm drew attention to decades of neglect, culminating in Charles I’s disafforestation grant of 1640 to Sir John Wintour. This grant included between 17,000 and 18,000 acres of woods and wastes in Dean, except for Lea Bailey, which had remained within the Crown estate and was surveyed by parliamentary surveyors during the Interregnum. In return for the woods, mines, and quarries, Wintour paid the late king £106,000 in installments and a fee-farm rent of £1,950 12s 8d per year forever.19 In effect the king disafforested Dean with the grant of 1640, but local uprisings in the forest clouded the situation; forest inhabitants rioted in

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1642, opposing the grant to the Catholic Wintour. The Forest of Dean experienced twenty years of seemingly unrestrained use by the inhabitants, commoners, forest cabin dwellers, ironmasters, free miners, and interests such as Wintour. During the Civil Wars and Interregnum inhabitants opposed Wintour, damaging fences of his enclosures until the 1656 Protectorate Act annulled Wintour’s grant and vested the Forest of Dean in the Lord Protector’s hands.20 Although Cromwell failed in his efforts to plant and reafforest21 Dean in 1657, his actions set a precedent for protecting timber resources within the forest. After the Restoration, Charles II emphasized forest policy –- protection of timber resources through the management and conservation (or wise use) of resources – to ensure future supplies.22 From 1660, Restoration forest policy supported the navy’s needs for timber and wood from the royal forests. The lessons of the first Anglo-Dutch War proved the need for domestic oak timber in times of war.23 With the continuation of hostilities against the Dutch and then against the French and the Spanish during the later seventeenth century, the Crown managed the royal forests within a climate of concern over the state of timber resources in the country. Consequently, Restoration policy for the English royal forests attempted to meet the navy’s needs for timber and woodland resources. While later in the seventeenth century forest policy favoured naval interests, constructing wooden walls to protect the English coastline, it was the shift after 1660 from selling forest resources to protecting them for future use by the navy that saved the English royal forests. This chapter shows that selected English royal forests made a particularly important contribution to navy building during the second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–67), when the domestic supplies of forest timber proved invaluable. The multiple demands upon the forests, alongside contemporary concerns for naval supply, often complicated the situation. Forest policy after the Restoration was more concerned with protecting trees and woodlands than with exploiting them as a source of income, which had occurred previously. Charles II gave naval demands precedence over the customary rights of commons interests, colliers, and ironmasters as well as the forest officers’ traditional fee payments. Unlike naval histories, this study explores fleet building from the perspective of the forest, looking at the role of and impact on selected English royal forests. The direction of Restoration forest management and conservation is explored, first, through the lenses of contemporary writers such as John Evelyn and agrarian improvement protagonists who were engaged in an ongoing dialogue over the use and protection of oak woods to provide timber resources; second, through Crown policy on timber and woods in royal forests after 1660; and finally, through an evaluation of practices within selected

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forests involved with naval projects after the Restoration, namely the Forest of Dean, the New Forest, and Sherwood Forest. The link between policy and practice within these oak forests was never simple and was clouded by rival interests. The contemporary writings of theorists on the management of woodland and timber resources for the navy focused attention on broad themes: planting woods with acorns or saplings reared in sheltered nurseries; felling trees in the correct season to ensure the best type of timber for naval purposes; seasoning the timber, either on the tree or once felled; and the practice of pilling, or removing the bark of a standing tree. These techniques all contributed to providing the most suitable timber for shipbuilding and repairs. In two forests, the Forest of Dean and the New Forest, the navy commissioners engaged in planting projects aimed at providing a constant supply of mature timber for naval use on an annual basis. In the rest of the English royal forests, which were not enclosed and planted but which grew by natural regeneration, naval purveyors also showed an interest in harvesting English oaks during Charles II’s navy-building drive of the 1660s. In 1660 Charles II benefited from a very powerful Cromwellian fleet at his disposal. Recent studies of the navy during the Interregnum and Restoration periods focus less on the physical construction of the navy than on the social world of these floating wooden worlds. These studies attest to the rapid development of the naval institution under Cromwell, continuing under Charles II.24 The navies of Cromwell and Charles II had much greater demands for shipbuilding than did early Stuart projects.25 Cromwell’s shipbuilding program, lasting less than a decade, surpassed the number of ships that had been built by the early Stuart kings over a half-century.26 The later Stuarts continued to build up the tonnage of the Royal Navy during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.27 The construction of the navy fleet from timber to dockyard launch received attention in the classic history of the navy from the first Anglo-Dutch War to the demise of the wooden sailing ship.28 After 1660 the major focus of Charles II’s royal forest policy was resource preservation for the Restoration navy. In a letter to the Lord Treasurer on 8 October 1661, James, Duke of York, revealed the financial reasons for drawing the forests into navy supply. The duke complained about “the want of money to buy timber from private men,” which made the royal forests look very attractive as a source of free timber supplies.29 Building on the legacy of Cromwell’s navy, developed in response to the Dutch threat, Charles II was quickly engaged in another shipbuilding phase during the second Anglo-Dutch War. This

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burst of activity involved the royal forests of Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest, but when Charles II began a project to build thirty ships in 1677, the limited forest sources were depleted.30 In the 1690s the New Forest was able to supply only small amounts of timber to Portsmouth. In terms of the overall demands of navy building, the contribution of the royal forests was small, but these resources were valued and important contributions especially during the Anglo-Dutch Wars when Baltic supplies were uncertain. Nor were the royal forests forever depleted after the navy drive of the 1660s. Trees were a renewable resource if allowed to regenerate and not uprooted, so these forests would be able to supply navy demands 100 years later, which was indeed the case in the 1760s and 1770s.31 In terms of the overall naval supply, one prominent naval historian has argued that the royal forests accounted for only 10 per cent of the overall timber arriving at the navy yards on average, thereby discounting the importance of the royal forests.32 While a large proportion of the navy’s timber supply came from the Baltic and the private forests of the southern counties of England, namely Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Surrey, a small but valuable contribution arrived annually from several of the English royal forests, which produced oaks (see fig. 7.1).33 The navy used royal forest timber spasmodically. Particularly after the first Anglo-Dutch War, the navy showed increased interest in the royal forests. The Navy Board relied on timber from several of the royal forests especially during the second Dutch War. The supply of oak for the navy was low, and between 1660 and 1675 the navy was unable to pay for private supplies of timber.34 The advantage of the royal forests for the Crown was that Charles II was able to take timber without paying for it, other than the cost of felling and transportation. Consequently, in certain years of the seventeenth century, the oaks from the royal forests were vital for navy shipbuilding. Intermittently, not only were the royal forests critical to the navy’s shipping program, but their use had significant local effects on the economy, society, and ecology of individual forests. Disruptions within the forests were usually caused by the rapid felling of woods, sometimes even clear cutting, before local labourers, carriers, and boatmen were mobilized to transport the timber from dispersed forest locations to London’s naval yards. Service to the navy, supervised by naval purveyors within individual forests, was often at odds with local routines and the farming seasons, particularly the harvest, which was the pulse of rural life. The royal forests were drawn into naval supply even though the preindustrial economy was ill-fitted to support the additional demands of naval timber carriage, especially if the forests lay at a distance from navigable

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Figure 7.1 The English Oak Forests

Source: R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1926), 108–9, with additions from original research in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1661– 62 (1861; reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1968).

water. Some river systems were navigable in the seventeenth century: the Trent and Ouse, the Severn-Avon, the Thames to Oxford, the Exe, and the Great Ouse, Cam, and Nen in East Anglia; however, most parts of England lay over fifteen miles from navigable water.35 The summer season, with dry roads, was paramount for successful land carriage of timber to the head of navigable water, but as the experiments in the Forest of Dean and Sherwood Forest showed in the 1660s, wet summers caused delays when muddy roads proved impassable.36 After the Restoration, Charles II’s forest policy responded to decades of abuse and waste of timber and wood within royal forests. Concerns about timber supply and particularly about practices in the Forest of Dean continued to absorb some of Parliament’s time.37 Exchequer commissions for a number of forests, including Sherwood and the Forest of Dean, drew attention to the poor condition of the woods and trees in these and other royal forests during the early 1660s.38 The Restoration government responded very swiftly, tightening its control of forestry practices in the royal woods. Royal proclamations and statutes demonstrated concern over woods and timber. The parliamentary

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proclamation of 17 May 1660 not only called for an end to the waste in Crown houses or lands, but also forbid any felling or removal of timber or woods until “the King’s pleasure is known.”39 Immediately after the Restoration, Charles II also appointed two surveyors of wood, one each for the divisions north and south of the River Trent. In 1660 Sir Charles Harbord, the surveyor general of woods lying south of the Trent, complained that there were far fewer trees than formerly within his jurisdiction.40 There was widespread waste of woods in Needwood Forest, Staffordshire, particularly from claims to fee trees.41 In August 1669 the king ordered the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to prevent all felling, empowering the lieutenant of Needwood to ensure that no trees were felled on any account.42 Furthermore, as local conditions changed, the forest policy of the later Stuarts responded to provide the maximum amount of timber for navy use. As timber trees became a more valuable commodity in the later seventeenth century, William III restricted the payment of fee trees to forest officers within certain royal forests. Immediately after the Restoration, Sherwood Forest’s officers had received annual customary payments of fee trees as part of their salaries.43 By the end of the century, William III replaced fee trees in Sherwood with a monetary payment of £5 in lieu of customary fee trees.44 This enraged Sherwood’s verderers, who were used to selecting more valuable trees. The response of post-Restoration forest policy to local issues such as fee trees reflected concern about timber resources and naval needs. Theft and misuse of the forests was a serious problem. In 1663 Charles II passed legislation to deter timber offences in forests and to protect stocks of young trees for the navy with “An Act for the punishment of unlawful cutting or stealing or spoiling of Wood and Underwood and Destroyers of Young Timber Trees.”45 Parliament also recommended reserving Dean, Sherwood, the New Forest, and all other demesnes for timber supply, “with the uttermost Care, for the Service of the Navy.”46 In 1663 there was an idea to re-enclose the King’s Coppice and to fence 300 acres of ground in the New Forest, furnishing “a Nursery and Supply of Wood and Tymber there.”47 Furthermore, by convening Restoration forest eyres, or courts, in Sherwood, Waltham, and the New Forest, Charles II responded to concerns about timber and woodland resources.48 The poor condition of royal woods had been apparent earlier in the century, but previous policies to remedy this situation were ineffective. During the Interregnum the commissioners overseeing the Forest of Dean had complained of the continual damage by army officers, ironmasters, and the “preservators” of the forest.49 On the eve

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of the Restoration the Protectorate government voiced these complaints about wasting woods in Dean.50 The waste and damage occurring within the royal forests spurred the House of Commons into action; in May 1659 Parliament appointed forest officers and commissioners to oversee timber preservation in Alice Holt and Woolmer Forests, in the Essex forests of Epping and Waltham, in the New Forest, and in Whittlewood Forest (see fig. 7.1).51 Exchequer special commissions to investigate practices in royal forests after 1660, including Dean, Sherwood, Waltham, and the New Forest, confirmed the general waste and abuse of woods and the malaise in the forests.52 As the most important royal forest for navy supply, the Forest of Dean received immediate relief after 1660, reafforesting the lands previously sold by Charles I. The damage and abuse sustained during Charles I’s personal rule, his grant of this forest to Wintour, and subsequent neglect and damage during the Civil Wars and Interregnum focused attention on Dean, well ahead of the New Forest. Timber protection, at the forefront of Restoration forest policy, aimed to provide valuable resources for the navy. In Dean the protection of royal timber woods went a step further in 1667 with “An Act for the Increase and preservation of Timber within the Forest of Deane,” which attempted measures similar to the timber enclosures created in 1657.53 The Dean Forest Act of 1668 laid out plans for planting large areas of the forest, which were to remain as naval plantations rearing oak timber. The Act of 1668 stipulated that at any one time 11,000 acres of the total area of the forest containing 18,000 acres could be enclosed. The plantations were not static. The idea of the “rolling” enclosure in Dean meant that once naval purveyors had taken timber from an area of the forest, the waste grounds were laid open, allowing forest commoners to graze their animals. In turn, the Crown took an equivalent area as a new nursery elsewhere in the forest. The advantage of the system was that it provided plantations of different ages, each reaching maturity at different times, but also that it allowed forest inhabitants with commons rights to feed their animals. The 1668 reafforestation Act also limited the number of royal deer to 800; this was to allow Charles II to exercise his prerogative by restocking Dean.54 No other forest had a legal limit on the number of royal deer living inside its bounds. Within the remainder of the royal forest system, the Crown was able to keep as many deer as it desired without stint as long as the forest officers were able to feed the herds. The plantation idea for the Forest of Dean was one of Cromwell’s legacies, although he showed little concern about the deer in the forest. Cromwell’s failed reafforestation Act of 1657 emphasized enclosure of young trees against grazing by cattle or deer, thereby protecting

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growth of saplings and older trees for naval use.55 The plantations enabled saplings to take root and establish themselves without constant nibbling during the early years of growth. After seven to nine years, the young trees were established enough to withstand daily incursions by animal grazers, at which time the forest officers threw open the enclosures. Although Cromwell’s attempts at reafforestation and enclosure of plantations within Dean had failed, many of his ideas formed the basis of the 1668 Dean Forest Act: planting, enclosing sections of the forest, preventing cattle and deer from damaging early tree growth, and a rotating enclosure. The post-Restoration Act for the increase and preservation of timber within the Forest of Dean reiterated many of the principles that had been formulated by the Interregnum government in response to the naval timber needs of the first Anglo-Dutch War. In 1668 the Act provided for 11,000 acres enclosed by a rolling enclosure, distributing the acreage throughout the forest, but at any one time only 6,000 acres were enclosed. This was similar to Cromwell’s plan in 1657, which envisaged the same enclosed acreage of 6,000 acres.56 The Dean reafforestation Act encapsulated some wellestablished theories of woodland and timber management, which dated at least from the early seventeenth century, but also relied heavily on Cromwell’s 1657 proposals for Dean. Planting in the Forest of Dean began promptly in 1668. Daniel Furzer oversaw the process, enclosing plantations for the sole use of the navy.57 Following the reafforestation Act, he oversaw laying out plantation divisions and enclosing the plots with fences.58 Pepys’s survey of the forest showed that a large part of the designated area had already been enclosed in 1671. He reported that there were already 8,486 acres enclosed out of the 10,000 acres of the forest waste, “planted and very well fenced either with stone walls or ditches with banks of quick-sett.”59 Another survey in 1680, not taken by the navy commissioners, referred to the new plantations by name. Most of the trees had grown past danger of animal browsing.60 Since the navy needed mature oaks of 80 to 120 years, these plantations were not ready for use until about 1740.61 Management of the Dean Forest timber enclosures continued during the later seventeenth century, overseen by forest officers as well as by navy and treasury officials. In 1680 the Dean Forest officers reported on the potential dangers faced by young trees within both open and enclosed woods, together with some of their efforts to manage the situation. They found no evidence of spoil by cutting young trees, but “the greatest mischief has been fireing of the gorse and young woods which has destroyed multitudes of hopeful young oaks and beeches.”62 The practice of firing served a valuable purpose as long as it was well

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managed.63 The Dean Forest officers also found and demolished about thirty cabins, inhabited by roughly “100 poor people in the Forest … many of whom have been born in the Forest.”64 In 1692 a Treasury report on the forest indicated an abundance of underwood in Dean. Although much of this lay outside the planted enclosures, commissioners wanted to cut the scrub birch, holly, hazel, and alder, which were both a valuable commodity and a threat to the natural regeneration of beech trees in the forest.65 At the end of the seventeenth century, William III passed another timber plantation Act for the New Forest in response to waste and damage. The Act was for the “Increase and Preservation of Timber,” thereby protecting newly sown plantations in the New Forest for naval use, as in the Forest of Dean. The New Forest Act was more moderate than the earlier Dean Act. It allowed 2,000 acres at the initial enclosure and included provisions for another 200 acres annually for the next twenty years, thereby providing an additional 4,000 acres in timber enclosures by 1718. Decayed trees provided the materials for fencing the enclosures, which protected young trees from animal browsing. When timber trees were out of danger from cattle and deer, forest officers in the New Forest were to lay open the enclosures and take an equal acreage elsewhere in the forest. There was a strict penalty of £10 for any forest officer who used the enclosures for browsing animals, especially deer, or who lopped any oak or beech.66 Making coal hearths or lighting coal fires for charcoal was strictly prohibited within the forest; any collier found making charcoal within 1,000 paces of any timber enclosure faced a fine of £100. As in Dean, the enclosures restricted commons rights until the new saplings were well established. The Act allowed common pasture rights on the waste grounds of the New Forest after 1716. The 1698 Act also allowed the inhabitants of adjacent villages to take forest materials allotted them by their customary fuel rights as long as they did not exploit this by selling additional fuel to others.67 The main difference between the New Forest Act and that for the Forest of Dean concerned the number of deer. The New Forest Act omitted any cap on the number of deer within the royal forest.68 Feeding the extensive deer herds by cutting browse wood in the New Forest was an ongoing task for forest officers during the later seventeenth century. A survey of deer numbers in 1670 estimated roughly 8,000 deer of different types in the New Forest.69 The Dean Act had limited the number of royal deer, whereas in the 1690s the New Forest was still heavily populated with deer. Celia Fiennes, a diarist and traveller, was astonished by the number of tame deer in the New Forest that required supplementary daily feeding in 1693.70 The plantation scheme

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in the New Forest was far more complex and problematic than in Dean given the regular demands for deer browse and the potential intrusion of numerous deer. By the late eighteenth century the Commissioners of Land Revenue found the New Forest so heavily stocked with deer that large numbers were dying for want of food during the harsher winters. The herds remained at roughly 5,900 head of fallow deer at the end of the eighteenth century and still relied on supplementary food for their survival.71 The New Forest failed to attract the same degree of attention as Dean immediately after the Restoration. The Protectorate government had never attempted a preservation Act for the New Forest, as it had for the Forest of Dean, although the New Forest possessed protective status from Interregnum sales based on its timber resources. A likely reason for much later legislation protecting timber resources in the New Forest was the absence of an embryonic Cromwellian Act similar to that for Dean. Over the decades following the Restoration, the New Forest attracted more attention in royal forest policy. The New Forest incurred considerable injury within its woods, particularly from forest officers claiming rights to enter the woods for cutting browse wood and firewood.72 After the Glorious Revolution, William III turned his attention away from the London dockyards to sites in Hampshire, establishing Portsmouth as an important centre for shipbuilding.73 The nearest source of supply from a royal forest was the New Forest. About a decade later the New Forest received its preservation Act. William III’s New Forest plantation Act of 1698 aimed to protect woodland and timber suitable for navy supply in future generations.74 While the Act coincided with a shift in location of naval yards at the end of the seventeenth century, the Hampshire royal forests and most other royal forests were in no state to supply much timber during William III’s reign.75 In 1698 the New Forest and all other royal forests were unable to provide sufficient timber for the navy on any regular basis. However, the Acts for the New Forest and Dean represented an investment in future navy supply.76 Charles II’s Restoration government showed a commitment to navy building through forest policy, which it actualized in practice through shipbuilding programs involving Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest. Traditionally, the private southern forests provided oaks and beech trees for naval use. Before the first Anglo-Dutch War the Crown relied on private ships assembling to form a fleet, rather than on a national navy built by the government; therefore, there was “no real timber problem” before 1652.77 During the 1660s several royal forests provided small but valuable amounts of timber for the navy. Later in

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the century, with the rise of Portsmouth as a dockyard, the navy increasingly looked to Hampshire for timber, especially the New Forest, with some coming from Alice Holt and Woolmer.78 While the royal forests were never the major suppliers of timber for navy use, compared with imports and private woods in the southern oak counties of Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Hampshire, the navy did rely on royal forest timber as part of its shipping program or rapid navy drive for brief periods during the seventeenth century, especially during the 1660s. For short periods, the Restoration government incorporated the three major sources of oak – Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest – into its naval plans. By linking these royal forests to the wider world of coastal, Channel, and Atlantic shipping, ecological damage resulted within the locales of the forests that could be repaired only by the natural regeneration of oaks over more than a century. In essence, during wartime, when foreign timber supplies were scarce, the navy drew from the royal forests as a small but crucial store of oak timber, thereby buttressing the wooden walls of empire. While there was some navy shipbuilding on the Severn estuary and the south coast at Portsmouth, most of the building immediately after the Restoration occurred in the Thames dockyards. The London yards had reached their height and nadir during the Anglo-Dutch Wars.79 According to the leading authority on navy building, the oak-producing counties of southern England were the primary sources of timber for the London yards at Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich from the mid-seventeenth century.80 Nonetheless, at certain periods, especially during the seventeenth-century wars with the Dutch, the Thames yards drew on timber from more remote forests. During the first AngloDutch War timber arrived from the Leith area outside Edinburgh in the Scottish lowlands. Coastal vessels transported the timber through treacherous east coast waters to London.81 Similarly, during the second Dutch War a number of inland royal forests sent timber by land, river, and coastal routes to the Thames dockyards. These sources included a number of remote royal forests in midland and southern England: Sherwood in Nottinghamshire; the Northamptonshire forests of Whittlewood, Rockingham, and Salcey; the small Hampshire forests of Bere, Alice Holt, and Woolmer; and the Oxfordshire forests, including Whichwood, Shotover, and Stowood (see fig. 7.1).82 Despite lying in the centre of England, Sherwood Forest contributed to naval demands during the 1660s, sending timber to the London yards at Deptford and Woolwich and to the east coast port of Harwich. Essentially, the rest of this chapter focuses on the roles of the Forest of Dean, the New Forest, and to a lesser extent Sherwood within naval shipbuilding and the Atlantic design of the later seventeenth century.

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At the Restoration the shipbuilding industry was already established in the Forest of Dean, although less important than the navy building program on the Thames.83 Following the first Anglo-Dutch War, the state’s ironworks within Dean provided materials for the forest-based shipping project at Lydney. Shipbuilding in Dean continued as part of Restoration naval policy. When there were problems with plans to build two new ships at Bristol, the work passed to the Lydney shipyard, under Daniel Furzer’s control. As the naval shipwright stationed in the Forest of Dean, Furzer managed the royal shipbuilding project within the forest at Lydney, relying on local timber. He launched two frigates, The Forester and The Princess (a fourth-rate ship) in 1660, and he began work on another frigate, the St David (another fourth-rate ship), which he finally launched in March 1667.84 By the mid-1660s the dockyard at Lydney was in decline; the stream leading from the River Severn at Lydney began to silt, making navigation difficult. Pepys agreed to a new dockyard site, and Furzer oversaw the royal dockyard’s move farther downstream to open water at Conpill, where the currents dispersed the alluvial deposits.85 In March 1665 Furzer built a storehouse at Conpill, but he encountered difficulties with timber carriage from the forest. In May 1666 Furzer was still trying to get logs that had been cut eighteen months before transported to the yard.86 The disadvantage of the Conpill site was that it was farther from the woods than Lydney, making land carriage more costly and inconvenient. There were numerous delays in the building process, which Furzer finally completed in March 1667. Additionally, there were problems with the product: when timber shrank, the ships very quickly became unseaworthy and needed further repair. The St David was built of green wood that was unseasoned. 87 The distance from navigable water was an important factor, as it determined the viability of inland timber sources with costly land-carriage rates. In 1664 Furzer sent timber from the Forest of Dean to Portsmouth by the coastal route.88 Within the forest the high cost of land carriage meant that Furzer sold off the timber lying at Lydney rather than move it to Conpill when the dockyard relocated.89 One historian of trees and woodlands has argued that complaints over the shortage of wood for the navy yards in England were not attributed to a lack of timber trees but to a “lack of funds, organization, and transport.”90 Furzer’s situation in Dean during the 1660s supported this view of preindustrial England. Furzer was always awaiting money to pay carters and boatmen; he also struggled against the other demands of the farming year, which controlled labour and transportation within this locale. The Forest of Dean contributed to navy building in the later 1650s and immediately after the Restoration. The zenith of the forest was

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particularly during the second Anglo-Dutch War, and cost-effective timber resources from Dean were exhausted by the 1677 project for the thirty ships. By about 1670 all mention of shipbuilding within Dean disappeared from the State Paper and Treasury records. However, the forest continued to supply timber, sending planks and other pieces to Portsmouth.91 In 1671 Furzer had moved to Woolwich, where he was repairing ships, and by 1676 Furzer was employed at Portsmouth.92 The New Forest and the other Hampshire royal forests also provided timber for the navy. Most timber from the New Forest went to the Portsmouth yard in the 1660s.93 Portsmouth had begun a resurgence of shipbuilding under Cromwell, providing twelve new naval ships during the Interregnum. Under the guidance of naval commissioners, Portsmouth built twenty-nine new ships during Charles II’s reign.94 In the summer of 1660 Portsmouth received timber from the New Forest. John Tippett, the master shipbuilder stationed at Portsmouth, awaited 600 timber trees from the forest in 1662.95 After the Restoration the New Forest continued to supply small amounts of timber to the Portsmouth yard for naval purposes.96 In 1676–77 the navy received another 300 trees.97 These were welcome additions in 1677, when Parliament voted £600,000 for building thirty new ships in an effort to counter Colbert’s shipbuilding in western France.98 However, the New Forest and the other royal forests were never major contributors of the timber required for the thirty ships.99 The arrival of timber from the New Forest had a part in the rise of Portsmouth and the western movement of navy yards away from the Thames. Most of the New Forest timber arriving at Portsmouth was sent along the coast by water, either from Redbridge or from Southampton. A small coastal vessel, or hoy, carried up to ten tons of timber from the New Forest to Portsmouth.100 Portsmouth was not well developed as a shipbuilding centre until the late 1680s, after which it contributed to the navies of William III and Queen Anne.101 The navy commissioners marked out 500 trees for felling in September 1690.102 A Treasury warrant of 1699–1700 allowed the navy another 1,000 trees from the New Forest.103 By the end of Queen Anne’s reign, there were more men employed in the Portsmouth yard than in any other dockyard. While in 1688 Portsmouth employed fewer than one-third of the hands working in the Chatham yard, the numbers were equal by 1696; in the period 1705–13 the number of Portsmouth yard hands surpassed the number in Chatham.104 By the summer of 1705 the navy dockyard at Portsmouth benefited from some of the windfall-timber trees damaged in the New Forest during the great storm of 1703.105 The surveyor general of Her Majesty’s woods south of the Trent, Mr Wilcox, promised 300 trees felled

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in the New Forest to the purveyor of the navy at Portsmouth in early November; he also delivered additional timber supplies from Rockingham Forest in Northamptonshire, Bushey Park, and Middle Park at Hampton Court.106 Besides the windfalls, the New Forest was scheduled to supply another 1,000 oaks and 100 beech trees to Portsmouth in 1705–06. However, Wilcox advised the Lords of the Treasury against this plan, fearing that the felling of “so many at that time would be much to Her Majesties disadvantage, as they would afford a great quantity of lops, tops, etc and the county had been lately glutted with windfalls.” Already “the underwoods had been directed to be sold to raise money for walling Hyde Park.”107 Wilcox’s advice to the Treasury was in accordance with the Crown’s interests. Because the local wood market was already saturated after the storm and due to underwood sales, the prices and profits were undoubtedly lowered in 1705–06. The proportion of the trees ending up at the naval yards seemed too small to justify the felling since Wilcox estimated that much was fit for sale only as lops and tops.108 By October 1706 the consignment of 500 trees from the New Forest had arrived at Portsmouth; however, the quality was variable. As a result, on 19 October the Treasury issued a warrant for another 65 trees in lieu of so many in the shipment found defective. Wilcox suggested cutting these substitute trees from one of the New Forest’s coppices, which had been scheduled for felling, sale, and use for fencing in February 1704.109 The next month Captain Townsend, a navy commissioner at Portsmouth, complained that it was very hard to get sufficient knees and standards used for building the curved frames of the vessels. Townsend wanted Wilcox to cut 500 pairs from the decaying trees in the New Forest, but the surveyor of woods recommended taking only one-fifth of that number. It was Wilcox’s opinion that “the timber of that forest should not be cut except on extraordinary occasions, but should be preserved as a check upon the timber merchants, who, when it was gone, would impose what rates they pleased.”110 Wilcox’s report of 1706 indicated not only the special importance of the royal plantations in times of emergency, but also their role in setting timber prices regionally and nationally. Timber importers’ prices could be held back by the existence of royal timber, making the forests important regulators of timber prices. The New Forest and Portsmouth were transformed for navy use in the years between Celia Fiennes’s visit in 1693 and Daniel Defoe’s tour three decades later. In 1724 Defoe remarked on the valuable contributions of this forest to shipbuilding and repair during William III’s reign. Despite the “very great consumption of timber” used for “building and rebuilding almost the whole navy,” he noted that many of the

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gentlemen’s estates within six to ten miles of Southampton were “overgrown with wood.”111 He compared these woods with the royal woods in the New Forest, where many of the ancient oaks had withered tops that had died back and were stag-headed. He regarded this not as decay but as evidence of the plentiful supply of timber in the county.112 In addition to the areas of woods and the recently enclosed plantations for timber, the New Forest contained considerable amounts of heath and furze, not unlike that in the wastes of Sherwood. In 1724 Defoe identified these New Forest heaths as ripe for agricultural improvement, but the furze was also a valuable asset for the navy at Portsmouth. In December 1703 Wilcox responded to a request from the commissioners of the navy to cut heath vegetation for “breeming” Queen Anne’s ships being built within the dockyard. Having consulted some of the keepers and regarders of the walks of the New Forest, Wilcox believed that it could supply Portsmouth with sufficient furze and heath without compromising the “vert” (trees and vegetation) and the “venison” (deer) within the forest, as long as the keepers supervised the cutting.113 Close to the New Forest, the small Hampshire forest of Bere also continued to supply timber to the navy during the early eighteenth century. In February 1706–07 Wilcox saw no objection to cutting 300 trees for navy use as long as the Warden undertook the felling work and sold them to the navy. Meanwhile, the warden of the Forest of Bere proposed that Wilcox recommend disafforesting, enclosing, and improving this forest.114 Wilcox disagreed, and the warden did not have his way, which meant that Bere remained a part of the royal forest system into the next century. Navy commissioners were insistent about cutting down the trees speedily: 300 from the Forest of Bere and 500 from the New Forest. The commissioners were racing against time; “as the spring came on apace,” they were concerned to fell these trees before the sap began to rise since any timber converted for shipping cut when there was sap in the tree “not only decayed itself, but that which was next to it.”115 Happily for Commissioner Townsend, the 500 trees from the New Forest arrived at Portsmouth dock a few months later.116 By the first decade of the eighteenth century, the development of Portsmouth was based on western shipping and the Atlantic trade. After the regeneration and growth of standard oaks felled in the mid-seventeenth century, the New Forest contributed again to navy building in the second half of the eighteenth century. The shift in the location of dockyards away from the Thames valley to the southwest coast reflected the westward direction of Atlantic trade and shipping as well as naval affairs.117 The contribution of Sherwood Forest to naval affairs in the later seventeenth century was more surprising than the supplies from either

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Dean or the New Forest. Although this landlocked Nottinghamshire forest lay within the heart of the country, the navy purveyors relied on regular shipments for consecutive years during the 1660s. During the second Anglo-Dutch War, Sherwood Forest was one of the most important contributors to the London yards. Sherwood possessed a locational advantage at the head of the River Trent system, which reached into the heart of the forest through the River Idle, a tributary of the Trent. From the river ports of Bawtry and Stockwith on the Rivers Idle and Trent, timber carriers from the Trent watershed fed into the Humber, its estuary, and the east coast beyond. It was by this route that the Royal Navy purveyors working within the forest transported Sherwood timber pieces, planks, and wood for treenails to Deptford, Woolwich, and Chatham.118 The forest also sent timber to Harwich for shipbuilding.119 The integration of the Trent watershed made it possible for navy purveyors to use royal timber resources in Sherwood Forest; the Crown possessed two extensive oak woods, called Birkland and Bilhagh, within this remote inland Nottinghamshire forest (see fig. 7.1).120 In December 1662 Thomas Corbin, the surveyor general of woods north of the Trent, visited John Russell in Sherwood to view the trees available for navy use. Together, Corbin and Russell marked 5,150 trees and another 400 trees for conversion into treenails. They happily concluded that in Sherwood “we conceive there may be many more useful trees.”121 Corbin and Russell worked between 1662 and 1664 on surveys and accounts of timber suitable for naval use from this forest.122 Russell sent accounts to the Navy Board outlining the charges for felling, squaring, and sawing the timber in the forest and then sending it to London. However, very soon the wharves at the two riverine forest ports of Bawtry and Stockwith were clogged with squared trees waiting for river and coastal vessels. John Russell, the navy purveyor stationed in Sherwood, faced serious logistical challenges: delays, financial difficulties paying carriers and boatmen, impassible roads, and problems finding adequate labour at certain times of the year, particularly during the harvest.123 Coordinating carters and river vessels proved impossible in 1664, when Bawtry and Stockwith were piled high with rotting logs, a nightmare for Russell, who watched the timber deteriorating on the dockside even before it reached the navy yards.124 Although much of the timber was arriving safely by the coastal route during the war years, the results at Woolwich were not so favourable. By November 1665 timber and squared plank from Sherwood carried in the Black Dog arrived at Woolwich on a regular basis.125 But John Cox and Jonas Shish at the Woolwich dockyard complained to the navy commissioners about the quality of plank sent from Sherwood. They considered it “a great loss to the King to saw that timber into plank

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because the greatest part of it is coarse and shaken.” Coarse and shaken planks were expensive to transport and had only limited use; therefore, Cox and Shish suggested to Russell that it was wiser to send the whole timber rather than converting it into plank within the forest.126 Felling in Sherwood continued apace over the 1660s. A further estimate of the royal woods of Birkland and Bilhagh in 1670 projected another 4,000 trees available in Sherwood, providing 4,500 loads of serviceable timber. This was adequate for the frames of four third-rate ships and for rebuilding the Royal Oak. By January 1670 the navy commissioners were also considering building ships at Hull; the new location promised lower carriage costs than transporting timber from Sherwood to the London dockyards.127 However, the felling operation in Sherwood was so rapid that by later in the year another report concluded that there was no longer “any more timber left in the woods.”128 Certainly, after 1670 records in the State Papers of correspondence between the purveyor John Russell and the Navy Board gradually diminished, with little reference to Sherwood, Birkland, and Bilhagh or to the river ports of Bawtry and Stockwith. For a brief period this inland midland forest had been drawn into naval provisioning, but as with most forests relying on natural regeneration for their regrowth, it would be another century before the woods of Sherwood Forest again contributed to naval affairs.129 Natural regeneration of woods involved a process that could be managed, particularly by controlling regrowth through restrictions on cutting and grazing immediately after felling a timber tree. Acorns falling from oaks sprouted, and young saplings grew up; another form of dispersal was by birds dropping acorns and other seeds within the bushy cover of the woodland understorey. However, by far the most important method of natural regeneration for oaks, birch, and elm was regrowth from the felled trunk base, or bole. After felling, at the base of the oak, young shoots sprouted forth with new growth. The tree regenerated naturally as long as the tree base and the roots remained intact; for success, woodwards and other forest officers had to protect the existing bole from grubbing up and cutting and had to prevent grazing animals from nibbling the new shoots. While natural regeneration was the woodland practice most widely used in early modern England, the details of the mundane and everyday work of the woodwards was rarely written down because it was so familiar. One leading botanist has argued that planting was far less important than the process of natural regeneration during the seventeenth century.130 The regeneration of oaks, especially when sheltered by bushes, had occurred since time immemorial in the New Forest.131 A study of the age profile of timber stands in this forest showed that

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there was some regeneration of oaks during the 1650s and 1660s in open parts of the New Forest.132 Another study of the forestry record suggested intensive felling during the late seventeenth century, with over 3,000 tons of timber taken in 1673 alone, which in turn gave rise to a regeneration phase. Another implication of the intense felling of oaks followed by regeneration periods was the change in the composition of the woods in the New Forest, with beech replacing oak.133 The English forests had been managed according to traditional forms of woodland practice, passed down from generation to generation. Traditional forest law already restricted the terms on which animals and humans had access to various forest resources. The major danger to natural regeneration within the royal forests was damage by grazers, either royal deer or other animals. This was a hazard by definition within the royal forests, which were open and subject to commons and other grazing rights.134 The fence month, which by forest law excluded pigs from the royal forests, mainly protected deer at fawning time, but it also gave the woods some brief protection for forest regrowth. One leading botanist has noted the hardiness of trees that were able to regenerate naturally within the unenclosed woods found throughout the wood-pasture system of the royal forests. In the New Forest and Hatfield Forest grazing had existed for centuries before the seventeenth century, and they still had plenty of trees.135 A Restoration survey of the ancient royal woods of Birkland and Bilhagh within Sherwood Forest provides a rare glimpse of the natural regeneration process in oaks and early woodland management practices. This account of natural regeneration appeared in correspondence between Thomas Corbin, who was the surveyor general of woods north of the Trent, and the Earl of Southampton, who was the Lord Treasurer. Writing about the royal woods of Birkland and Bilhagh, Corbin described their age-old management, although he never referred to it by that modern term. He reported that in 1664 the two woods contained about 2,000 acres, where about 42,000 oaks were growing in 1662. He proposed felling in winter because “the roots … are very sound and will put forth very strong shoots, if preserved from sheep and cattle.”136 Corbin was confident that if protected, the new shoots springing from the roots of felled trees in Birkland and Bilhagh would “not only be trees but keep up the glory of the forest.”137 He explained to Southampton that he had seen in Sherwood one great cluster of trees “a foot square and thriving that grow on old roots, which they had been preserved from browsing, and but one stem left on the root, had now been the biggest sort of timber.”138 Corbin proposed fencing the woods not only to control grazing, but also to prevent the local townspeople and keepers from sending their pigs into the forest

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to feed on the acorns, their right of pannage.139 Although in 1664 Corbin was optimistic of enclosing the woods of Birkland and Bilhagh, it was much more difficult to achieve in practice. He made no further attempt to fence and rail the woods, which were the mainstay of life for numerous surrounding villages. The royal woods of Birkland and Bilhagh still remained open in 1793 when visited by land revenue surveyors sent to consider enclosure methods similar to those suggested by Corbin over a century earlier.140 After 1660, Restoration forest policy involved not only traditional forest law, but also Parliamentary legislation that included setting up plantations. Restoration forest policy and theory paid great attention to planting for navy timber supply. However, most of the oaks supplying the navy in the 1660s were not from plantations. The timber plantation and preservation Acts for the Forest of Dean and the New Forest were future investments. In practice, the trees used by the navy in the Anglo-Dutch Wars grew by natural regeneration. The speed of shipbuilding projects after the Restoration, the 1677 scheme, and William III’s navy building in the later seventeenth century were impressive, but they produced problems for the fleet. Ideally, timber oaks needed about three years to dry out and to season effectively.141 As one naval historian concluded of the late-seventeenthcentury fleet, it was “almost a total loss” because it was built with “green” timber.142 Samuel Pepys observed toadstools growing in the holds of the thirty new ships.143 He also found foreign oak and plank in the construction and “green oak” used in shipping because of the hastiness of the building schemes.144 The practices of naval employees within the royal forests during the 1660s supported some of these charges. In the Forest of Dean and Sherwood Forest navy purveyors felled large quantities of timber very quickly; much timber lay in the rain on wharves waiting for transport to the navy yards. Naval purveyors in the two forests made no mention of pilling these oaks; this was a luxury that they were unable to enjoy. At the dockyards the royal forest timber sometimes arrived in poor condition. In January 1670 Commissioner Tippetts told other navy commissioners that the trees in Sherwood had already “stood long past their growth, they are now decaying.”145 Furthermore, at a distance the oaks in Birkland and Bilhagh looked sound, but up close Tippetts found “6 or 8 to one were wind shaken.”146 Because of the rapid shipbuilding of this era, the navy was desperate and consequently transported and used green, unseasoned, shaken, or decaying timber. Although acts passed in the later seventeenth century showed that Restoration forest policy was committed to preserving timber in Dean and the New Forest, in practice the implementation proved very limited.

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Yet the forest preservation Acts for the Forest of Dean (1668) and the New Forest (1698) boded well for future planting and timber growth after the late seventeenth century. These Acts segregated young growing trees from the royal deer and other grazing animals, which was impossible to achieve in other royal forests without similar legislation. One naval historian described Dean as “the first real plantation made by the government,” with more than 8,000 acres in enclosures almost immediately and the remaining 3,000 acres not long after, but “then the plan ‘evaporated.’”147 In 1705 Edward Wilcox, the surveyor general of woods, surveyed the woods in Dean, finding them “very full of young Trees, Two-third Parts whereof were Beech, which overtopped the Oaks, and would prevent them from ever growing up to be Ship Timber.”148 Wilcox suggested a return to the original enclosure Act for dividing the 11,000 acres into sixteen parts of 700 acres each, felling one parcel each year and leaving the standard trees for the navy. However, he soon encountered opposition from those in Dean with common herbage and pannage rights in the forest who wanted to graze their pigs on acorns and beech mast in these enclosures. Meanwhile, the poor inhabitants of Dean employed by ironmasters to cut underwood opposed the commoners and supported Wilcox’s scheme to revitalize the plantations. Little came of these plans. Even in 1736 Christopher Bond, conservator and supervisor of the forest, reported neglect in the 11,000 acres of plantation. Over the longer term, forest officers had failed to maintain the enclosures, and only a few acres were kept up.149 While there was some activity in planting the Dean Forest enclosures by the end of the seventeenth century, there was little change in the New Forest. One historian of the New Forest showed that the forest officers made only limited progress enclosing for timber following the 1698 Act. In 1703 the Treasury had allotted funds for Philip Ryley, surveyor general of woods south of the Trent, to make the enclosures in the New Forest. The individual enclosures named in Ryley’s account suggested 996 acres of new enclosures planned in 1703.150 In practice, planting the New Forest resulted in only 1,022 acres of enclosures out of the potential 2,000 acres allowed at the initial enclosure while creating an additional 4,000 acres of “rolling” enclosure by taking in 200 acres annually for twenty years. After the initial enclosure and about fifteen years of maintenance, the forest officers in the New Forest neglected the plantations following Queen Anne’s reign. There were a few small additions to the enclosed plantation area of the New Forest in the eighteenth century, with another 230 acres added in 1750 and 2,044 in 1776; this figure had risen to only 3,296 acres by the late eighteenth century.151 One historian of the New Forest has also

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blamed the practical failure of the New Forest plantation on the unclear drafting of the Act; none of the parties had agreed on the practical meaning of “rolling” enclosure, which was meant to rotate the enclosed area around the forest. In addition, the Act took no account of the variety of soil quality for grazing in different parts of the forest, nor did it consider the suitability of soils for timber.152 The length of time for growth into ship timber varied with soil quality, ranging from 80 to 150 years.153 However, there were some positive outcomes of the New Forest preservation Act. The surviving botanical record of the forest showed that officers in the New Forest stopped pollarding or topping trees as a general practice from about 1698, coinciding with the Act of that year.154 Another positive outcome of the Act, although not for the trees, was that it legally recognized commons rights within the New Forest.155 A survey of naval timber in the New Forest in 1707 confirmed the need for forest preservation, but the New Forest Act itself was too recent to have produced results by then. A comparison of two royal surveys of woods in 1608 and 1707 revealed that the trees fit for naval use in 1707 were only one-tenth of those available a century earlier.156 However, the 1707 survey also showed that there were many young trees, which would reach maturity for the navy in about forty years. One forester argued that this indicated some regard for future timber supplies after the Restoration. Furthermore, the 1707 survey also showed that although the old trees in the New Forest were decaying, some contained valuable knee pieces required in shipbuilding.157 The stalling of plantation enclosure in both the New Forest and the Forest of Dean during the early eighteenth century indicated a malaise. One historian of the navy has argued that even before 1725 the timber enclosure policy was in decline and that forest officers neglected these two forests. Besides the failure to actively manage the timber plantations for naval use, there was widespread destruction of wood resources within the forest system in the Georgian period.158 Albion has criticized government forest policy, which by failing to follow through in practice with these two plantation Acts in Dean and the New Forest, denied England a continuous supply of naval timber from Crown reserves.159 The forests generally consisted of open wood-pasture and were the subject of commons rights, which were not easily extinguished. Although Albion bemoaned the lost potential of the royal forests for navy timber supply, the idea of plantation and exclusion of commons rights was difficult to achieve without disafforestation and all the resistance and complexities involved with such an extreme measure. In 1664 John Evelyn clearly realized that the main method to increase timber supply

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in practice was through timber enclosures on private estates. Unlike royal forest lands, private estates were uncomplicated by commons rights and multiple users having access to forests. By focusing on the failure of Stuart forest policy, Albion underrated the power of resistance from the other interests with a stake in the woodland assets of the royal forests. The chief stakeholders capable of interference with the success of plantations were those with commons rights to graze animals and to take wood, particularly ironmasters and colliers within the Forest of Dean and forest officers in all the royal forests. The revival of Restoration forest law and forest offices had created a large forest civil service whose members expected rewards in kind as well as salaries. At the turn of the eighteenth century Edward Wilcox, the surveyor general of woods in the Forest of Dean, faced the problem common to all royal forests: the difficulty of managing a mixture of different rights and claims to the same ground. Compared with other royal forests, conditions in Dean were perhaps the least complicated because the 1668 Act had defined rights and limited the number of royal deer in this forest. In the late eighteenth century the Commissioners of Land Revenue highlighted the problem in Dean, where “the Rights of all Parties are less complicated and better defined than in any other” forest but where the interests of commoners and colliers demonstrated “the bad Effects which must arise from any Mixture of Interests whatever.”160 The commissioners suggested a plan to divide the forest by assigning specific portions of territory to different groups.161 In effect, they advocated complete segregation of uses and abandonment of the royal forest as an institution. This sort of solution was never feasible, plausible, or possible for the royal forests in the later seventeenth century. Thus the overlapping mixture of uses, which lay at the very core of the royal forests, explained some of the practical failures in Restoration forest policy that ultimately favoured the Royal Navy. Writers of the early and mid-seventeenth century had introduced ideas for sound woodland management, tree husbandry, or proto-forestry through the concept of enclosed orderly plantations. However, in the royal forests there was often a mismatch between policy and practice. In the royal forests of Dean and the New Forest the Restoration government faced difficulties and encountered resistance to the implementation of change because forest law promoted and guaranteed multiple uses of land. On private estates, landowners were able to segregate the use of land, enclosing their nurseries and plantations against competitors. John Evelyn’s popular ideas in Sylva (1664) were generally unfeasible within the royal forests, where commons rights were always a challenge to segregated use of land. However, Evelyn’s

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insights would germinate in the minds of the English gentry, which influenced timber management on the great estates after the later seventeenth century. There was some success in the royal plantations. In 1662 the Exchequer commissioners complained about the old decayed trees within the Forest of Dean, and in 1671 Pepys described the oak woods as “very wind-shaken.”162 However, in 1680 forest officers reported that over half of the forest was covered with young trees of oak, beech, birch, and hawthorn; these were also interspersed with oaks and beeches of forty years growth both inside and outside the new enclosures.163 The riots of 1688 damaged many of the young trees, and the “country people” stole some timber trees. In April 1690 there were no trees suitable for navy use according to Philip Ryley, the surveyor general of woods south of the Trent. After surveying the forest, he estimated that there were about 100,000 young saplings for future ship timber, indicating practical replanting efforts within Dean.164 By the end of the seventeenth century the woods were regenerating naturally in the open forest and responding to plantation methods within the small acreage of planted enclosures. Despite direct opposition and passive resistance within Dean and the New Forest during the later seventeenth century, the navy’s felling campaigns in these and other oak forests in the later eighteenth century attested to the success of oak regeneration either naturally or in plantation plots. After all, timber trees needed about a century to reach sizes suitable for navy use. The later Stuarts and their parliaments embraced measures to protect and increase timber resources for the navy, indicated by the two Acts to increase and protect timber resources in Dean and the New Forest. After the Restoration, Charles II appointed two new offices to oversee woodland management: the surveyors of woods north and south of the Trent were distinct from the surveyor of Crown lands within these two divisions. By 1714 Queen Anne combined the two divisions into one jurisdiction devoted to timber management within the royal forests. While the overall contribution of royal forests to English navy building was small and spasmodic, these forests were valuable domestic resources, if only as a potential supply in times of national emergency, when traditional timber supplies might be unavailable. Royal timber in the forests served another purpose: for the Crown, it was a valuable bargaining chip in the timber market and thus contributed to fixing the local price of timber and the price of private wood supplied by merchants to the navy yards. Restoration forest policy focused on the conservation of timber resources and naval supply, reversing early Stuart and Commonwealth policy devoted to forest sale. The need to protect oaks within the royal

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forests as a cheap supply of naval timber meant that in essence the Restoration navy saved the English royal forests from sale plans. Restoration forest policy also drew lessons from the Interregnum. Supporting a strong navy with domestic timber was paramount after the first AngloDutch War cut off Baltic supplies. Cromwell had introduced the idea of planting in the Forest of Dean, albeit unsuccessfully in practice. The models for Restoration navy policy were rooted in the previous decade, when Cromwell built up the state’s navy, sought timber from domestic royal forests, and attempted to reafforest and plant the Forest of Dean. These legacies informed Restoration forest policy, which protected naval resources. After the Restoration, Parliament continued to have a greater role in the protection of timber resources, demonstrated by the plantation Acts for Dean and the New Forest. While it was not difficult for Charles II and other post-Restoration monarchs to justify a forest policy that favoured the navy’s needs for national security, in practice the other stakeholders had to take a lesser place or share within the forests. The success of Crown forest policy depended on its ability to carry policy into practice and to limit resistance of all other interests. Despite interference from within the forests, during wartime several of the Restoration oak forests provided naval timber. The small but crucial amounts from the Forest of Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest helped to buttress England’s wooden walls, ensuring the navy’s patrol of the English Atlantic empire well into the eighteenth century.

notes 1 I wish to thank Ian K. Steele and Nancy Rhoden for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter as well as Phil Stooke for his assistance with the map in figure 7.1. 2 W. Bray, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (London: J.M. Dent, 1907), vol. 1, 369. 3 Ibid. 4 R. Latham and W. Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), vol. 3, 35. 5 Ibid. 6 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (1861; reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1968) (hereafter cspd), 1661–62, 281, 296; Latham and Matthews, eds, Diary, vol. 3, 35; H.G. Nicholls, Forest of Dean: An Historical and Descriptive Account, and Iron Making in the Olden Times (1866; reprint, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1967), 39. 7 cspd, Interregnum, 1656–59; cspd, 1655–56, 434; C.E. Hart, Royal Forest: A History of Dean’s Woods as Producers of Timber (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 144. On the Lydney dockyard project, see F.H. Harris, “Lydney Ships,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 67 (1945): 238–45.

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8 cspd, Charles I, 1634–35, 237; Victoria County History (hereafter vch), Gloucestershire, vol. 2, 273–4. About 1,000 trees blew down in two hours on 14 October 1634. 9 The 1661–62 survey appears in Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 11, 286–90. See also Third Report of the Commissioners of Land Revenue, Dean (1788), 14, reprinted in S. Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1975), vol. 76, 1787–90; vch, Gloucestershire, vol. 2, 274. The Dean survey recorded 30,233 trees, identified as 25,929 oak and 4,204 beech, containing 121,572 cords of wood and 11,335 tons fit for the navy. 10 cspd, 1661–62, 280, 302. 11 Thomas, Lord Coventry to the Judges of England, in J. Rushworth, Historical Collections, vol. 2, 1721, 17 June 1635, cited in N.D.G. James, A History of English Forestry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 139. 12 Lord Howard of Effingham referred to the royal woods and forests as the “jewels” of Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom, in cspd, 1591–94, 289; R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862, Harvard Economic Series, no. 26 (1926; reprint, Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1965), 124. Albion argues that the royal forests were not important suppliers of naval timber overall. However, this author believes that some of the southern royal forests provided a small but assured source of timber trees for naval yards when traditional Baltic timber was unavailable. After the first Anglo-Dutch War, the navy showed increasing interest in the royal forests, especially during the second and third Dutch Wars. On the history of Anglo-Baltic trade, see J.K. Fedorowicz, England’s Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in Anglo-Polish Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1980); H.S.K. Kent, “The Anglo-Norwegian Timber Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 8, no. 2 (1956): 62–75. 13 The Forest of Dean was the leading naval timber supplier in August 1611, providing 2,000 oak and beech, followed by the New Forest (1,000) and Sherwood (800); see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, part 21, 1609–12, 307. Other suppliers in the early seventeenth century included Chopwell Woods in Durham, the small Hampshire forest of Alice Holt, and the forests of Shotover and Stowood outside Oxford; see cspd, 1634–35, 301, 499, 502, 561–2; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, map of the English oak regions and royal forests, 108–9. 14 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers perpetuated the story of a threatened Spanish invasion, which was an early modern instance of an “urban legend.” The writers stressed that the Spanish had sent the Armada on a special, failed mission to destroy the Forest of Dean. These included the influential seventeenth-century agrarian writer and founder of the Hartlib Circle, Samuel Hartlib, His Legacie, 2nd ed. (London: 1652), 84; John Evelyn, Sylva, 1st ed.

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(London, 1664), 108; and John Evelyn, Silva, ed. Alexander Hunter (London, 1776), 564. See also vch, Gloucestershire, vol. 2, 27. Evelyn, “Preface to Reader,” in Sylva, 1st ed., n.p. Evelyn’s Sylva passed through several editions, with various additions and enlargements during the seventeenth century; the first edition was printed in 1664, and subsequent editions followed quickly in 1670 and 1679. On Sylva’s place in print history, see L. Sharp, “Timber, Science, and Economic Reform in the Seventeenth Century,” Forestry 48, no. 1 (1975): 51–86. An exploration of the eighteenth-century editions of Sylva has shown a spiritual redefinition of the text; see D. Chambers, “The Legacy of John Evelyn’s Sylva in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Life 12 (1988): 29–41. I am grateful to Professor J.N. Thompson for this reference. cspd, 1661–62, 522. Bray, ed., Diary, vol. 1, 369. Wintour’s grant, 21 March 1640, Third Report, 13, and appendix 6, 60, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90; Hart, Royal Forest, 125; vch, Gloucestershire, vol. 2, 273. The commoners of the forest received only 4,000 acres in lieu of commons rights. On the unique rights of the commoners of the Forest of Dean, see C.E. Hart, The Commoners of Dean Forest (Gloucester: The British Publishing Co., 1951). On social protest in the Forest of Dean, see B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire, 1640–1672 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), 31, 132–3, 141, 144–6; Third Report, 14, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. Cromwell forcibly removed the cabins of squatters living on the forest’s wastes. “Reafforestation” returned a territory to forest law, whereas “reforestation” meant replanting trees. Contemporaries referred to the “preservation” of woods, by which they meant the current term “conservation,” or the wise use of timber resources for the navy. See S. Morrison, “The Stuart Royal Forests: From Venison Pie to Wooden Walls” (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2004), esp. ch. 5, 199–243. R. Harding, The Evolution of the Sailing Navy, 1509–1815 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 85. In 1660 Charles II inherited eighty-eight large warships, which gave England sixteen more than the second-place Dutch; see B. Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); J.D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and the Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). The multivolume history of the navy by N.A.M. Rodger considers the navy until 1649; see The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, vol. 1, 660–1649 (London: Harper Collins, 1997), and The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, vol. 2, 1649– 1815 (New York: Norton, 2005).

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25 For an early study of the Restoration navy, see A.W. Tedder, The Navy of the Restoration: From the Death of Cromwell to the Treaty of Breda … (1916; reprint, Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1970). A valuable recent study is Harding, Evolution, 85–114. The navy debt in 1660 was £1,250,000, plus £400,000, the yearly cost of keeping the fleet during peacetime; see Harding, Evolution, 95. In 1660 Charles II inherited 57,463 tons of ships in the Royal Navy from Cromwell; in 1685 Charles II had 103,558 tons of ships in fleet; see Eleventh Report of the Commissioners of Land Revenue, General Naval Timber (1792), appendix 23, 137, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 77, 1792. 26 James I and Charles I built fewer than 30,000 tons of ships in forty-four years, whereas Cromwell built over 36,000 tons in eleven years; see C.R. Tubbs, The New Forest: An Ecological History (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1968), 76; M. Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy from 1509–1660, 1st ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 1896; reprint, Ann Arbor: The Shoestring Press, 1961), 330–7. Oppenheim lists the names of 207 ships of different classes, which served at some time in the fleet during the period 1649–60. On the early Stuart navy, see C.D. Penn, The Navy under the Early Stuarts and Its Influence on English History (Manchester: The Faith Press, 1913); J.R. Powell, The Navy in the English Civil War (Hamden, ct: Archon Books, 1966); B.W. Quintrell, “Charles I and His Navy in the 1630s,” The Seventeenth Century 3 (1988): 159–79. 27 Eleventh Report, appendix 23, 137, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 77, 1792. Between 1660 and 1685 tonnage increased from 57,463 tons to 103,558 tons. Despite a slight reduction under James II to 101,892 tons in 1688, both William III and Queen Anne increased the Royal Navy’s tonnage. William III made substantial increases to the royal fleet, passing on 159,017 tons to Queen Anne in 1702; by the end of her reign in 1714, the Royal Navy was 167,171 tons. 28 Albion, Forests and Sea Power; R.G. Albion, “The Timber Problem and the Royal Navy, 1652–1862,” The Mariner’s Mirror 38 (1952): 4–22. Pine masts came from New England; see W.R. Carlton, “New England Masts and the King’s Navy,” New England Quarterly 12 (1939): 4–18. I am grateful to Professor J. Woycke for this reference. On some of the problems of shipbuilding once forest timber arrived in navy yards, see R. Knight, “From Impressment to Task Work: Strikes and Disruption in the Royal Dockyards, 1688–1788,” in K. Lunn and A. Day, eds, History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1–20 (London: Mansell, 1999). 29 Public Record Office (hereafter pro), Admiralty 2/1745 (hereafter adm). 30 For an overview of early Stuart navy building and particularly Cromwell’s expansion of the navy, see Oppenheim, A History, 302–71; F. Fox, “The English Naval Shipbuilding Programme of 1664,” The Mariner’s Mirror 78, no. 3 (1992): 277–92; J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–97 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 46; D.C. Coleman, “Naval

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Dockyards under the Later Stuarts,” Economic History Review n.s. 6, no. 2 (1953): 134–55. Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest supplied timber to the navy in the 1760s and 1770s after 100 years of growth, see Third Report, appendix 32, 99, appendix 34, 101, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90; Fifth Report of the Commissioners of Land Revenue, New Forest (1789), appendix 24, 90–2, appendix 36, 110, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787– 90; Fourteenth Report of the Commissioners of Land Revenue, Sherwood Forest (1793), appendix 28, 61, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 78, 1792–93. Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 106. Baltic oaks were used for plank below the waterline, and in 1677 the project to build thirty ships used Baltic plank; see ibid., 10, 21. Ibid., 108–9. Ibid., 133. The shortage of timber, combined with demands for timber after the Fire of London, exacerbated the problem. J. Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (New York: Norton, 1989), 222. pro, State Papers (hereafter sp) 29/347/407, adm 106/282. On the need for dry summers for land haulage of timber, see Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 103–5. The maximum haul for good oak was twenty miles. Commons Journal (hereafter cj) 8, Index entries for “Timber” and “Dean.” pro, Exchequer (hereafter e) 178/6080 and 178/6405. Petitioning the king, one of Sherwood’s verderers, John Trueman, commented on the poor condition of woods about 1663; see pro, sp 29/89/63. “By parliament, ordered by Lords and Commons. All waste in Crown houses or lands to be stopped, and no timber or woods to be felled or removed till the King’s pleasure be known”; cited in R.R. Steele, ed., A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, 1485–1714, vol. 1, England and Wales (1910; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), 386. cspd, 1660–61, 206, 72, 259, 357, 430. Thomas Corbin was the surveyor general of woods north of the Trent, receiving £50 annually as a fee. Daniel Treswell replaced Sir Charles Harbord as surveyor of the king’s woods and forests south of the Trent in November 1660. A fee tree was a customary annual payment of a tree as part of an officer’s salary. cspd, 1668–69, 444. cspd, Addenda 1660–70, 21. The five verderers and the clerk of the forest each selected a tree in 1660–61. pro, Land Revenue Record Office (hereafter lrro) 5/51/3, 72. The 1663 Act reiterated the terms and penalties of the earlier Act 43 Elizabeth, which had been incorporated into the Interregnum Ordinance for the four forests on 30 August 1654; see Statutes of the Realm (hereafter sr), 5, 441– 2, 15 Charles II, c. 2.1663; C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, eds, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), vol. 2, 996.

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46 cj 8, 7 September 1660, 156. 47 pro, Crown Estate Office (hereafter cres) 6/9, 133–4, and 2/1673. Although there are Treasury warrants related to this enclosure in 1663, there was little further evidence to support action. 48 The forest eyre was the highest forest court; its recall indicated a concern about forest offences. 49 cspd, 1649–50, 443–4; Isaac Bromwich, The spoiles of the forest of Deane asserted in answer to a scurrilous libell lately set forth to blast the justice and proceedings of some commissioners of Parliament in that behalfe by Isaac Bromwich, Esq a well wisher to the preservation of that forest, and a joynt commissioner (London, 1650). 50 cspd, 1659–60, 328. 51 cspd, 1657–58, 206; 1658–59, 355–6, 361; 1659–60, 28, 190, 320–1, 325, 327; cj 7, 650, 668, 670, 759, 856. 52 pro, e 178/6080, 178/6453, and 178/6405. Commissions for Dean, Sherwood, and the New Forest showed that abuses had occurred not only since 1642, but also in the short space of time since the Restoration. 53 Of the 23,000 statute acres in Dean, 11,000 were enclosed as a “nursery for Timber,” and the trees therein were marked with “a broad Arrow and Crown.” Owners and tenants in the rest of the forest were allowed to cut wood outside the enclosures and also permitted to improve their grounds, as in the 1657 Act. The Act limited the number of deer to 800. Out of 10,000 acres for the Crown in forest waste, there were 4,000 acres for commons and 6,000 acres in timber enclosure at any one time. Miners and colliers had rights outside the enclosures, and Sir John Wintour retained his lease of ironworks for a term. Reafforestation returned Dean’s bounds to those established in sr, 5, 636–9, 20 James I, 19 and 20 Charles II, ch. 8, 1667–8; cj, 8, Index; Hart, Royal Forest, 157, 291–5. 54 sr, 5, 636–9, 19 and 20 Charles II, “An Act for the Increase and Preservation of Timber within the Forest of Dean,” in Third Report, appendix 7, 64–5, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90; Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 12, 291–5. A plantation is “a closely spaced stand of trees, other than an orchard, formed by planting them”; see O. Rackham, Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape (London: J.M. Dent, 1976), 200. 55 Firth and Rait, eds, Acts and Ordinances, vol. 2, 1114–15, 9 June 1657, “An Act for the mitigation of the rigor of the Forest Laws, within the Forest of Dean … and for the preservation of Wood and Timber”; Hart, Royal Forest, 148–9. 56 For a comparison of Cromwell’s failed Act of 1657 and the reafforestation Act of 1668, see Third Report, appendix 7, 64–5, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. See also Calendar of Treasury Books (hereafter ctb), 1667–68, Reafforestation Act of 1668, 131; Firth and Rait, eds, Acts and Ordinances, vol. 2, 1114–15; and Third Report, 182, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90.

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57 pro, lrro 3/12. 58 On laying out the Dean enclosures, fencing, and dividing commons, see Thomas Agar’s wood accounts, 1669–73, in pro, lrro 3/12. Agar gives a detailed account of the names and cost of ditching the enclosures and instructions for two rows of quicksets and a hedge on top of the ditch. These enclosures had iron gates and stiles across the rails. He carried out this work according to a Treasury warrant of 7 June 1669 to enclose the 11,000 acres. 59 Pepys’s 1671 survey of Dean, in Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 13, 296–7. 60 The Report of 1680, in Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 14, 298–300. 61 J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–97 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 46. 62 pro, lrro 3/12. Thomas Agar’s wood accounts show repairs to the enclosures after damage sustained in the period 1669–73; see the Report of 1680, in Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 14, 298–300. 63 Firing was a practice used to eliminate the build-up of dead understorey, which if left to accumulate posed the danger of an even greater fire. James I had passed a statute for controlling burning in 1610, but the practice still continued in Sherwood Forest in Queen Anne’s reign; see statutes for controlling burning in sr, 4 (2), 1172, 1610, 7 James I, c. 13, “An Act against burninge of Linge and Heath, and other Moorburninge in the Counties of Yorke, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancaster, Derbye, Nottingham, Leicester, at unseasonable tymes.” The continued burning in Sherwood Forest is referred to in sr, 8, 585–6, 1706, 9 Anne, c. 16, “An Act for the better Preservation of Game.” 64 The Report of 1680, in Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 14, 300. 65 pro, Forest Records 16/29; Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 15, 301; Third Report, appendix 8, 68, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. The report provides details of wood location, species of trees, number of acres, years of growth, and estimated number of cords for cutting. 66 sr, 7, 405–8, 9 William III, c. 33, “An Act for the Increase and Preservation of Timber in the New Forest in the County of Southampton.” There is little to indicate that the scheme of 1663 to enclose 300 acres for plantations was ever carried out; on the 1663 scheme, see pro, cres 2/1673 and 6/9, 133–4. The total area of the enclosures began at 2,000 acres and by 1718 was fixed at 4,000 acres; however, the enclosed area was to be moved around the forest after the first twenty-one-year cycle. 67 sr, 7, 405–8. On setting out the enclosure and the restrictions on colliers, see ctb, 1699–1700, 256, 268–9, 307, 322, 352. 68 sr, 7, 405–8, 9 William III, c. 33, “An Act for the Increase and Preservation of Timber in the New Forest in the County of Southampton.” Although the wording of the Act denotes “preservation” of timber, in the seventeenth century this was consistent with the modern definition of “conservation,” or wise use of resources, not with the environmental historian’s definition of “preservation” as

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wilderness protection. The royal timber reserves were never intended as wilderness preserves, far from it. Tubbs, New Forest, 132. The deer census for 1670 showed 7,593 fallow deer and 375 red deer. The total red deer were those imported from France in 1670; see ibid., 134. C. Fiennes, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. C. Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 50. Fifth Report, appendix 22, 69, 80, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90; Tubbs, New Forest, 133. The 1789 report showed 5,900 fallow deer. During the bad winter of 1787–88, about 500 deer died in each of two forest walks. pro, e 178/6453. On earlier abuses in the New Forest, see British Library, Additional Ms. (hereafter bl, Add.) 38,444, 1–3. There was a suggestion to enclose 300 acres of the New Forest into separate 100–acre plots in 1663, although nothing happened; see pro, cres 6/9, 133–4, and 2/1673. On the shift of shipbuilding from the London navy yards and the rise of shipbuilding at Portsmouth, see A.J. Holland, Ships of British Oak: The Rise and Decline of Wooden Shipping in Hampshire (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), 76–98. On the New Forest and shipbuilding, see Ehrman, The Navy, 43, 46, 51, 590. See also Jeremy Greenwood, The New Forest and the Navy: Timber Supplies to Portsmouth Dockyard, 1660–1790 (Self-published, 2004). sr, 7, 405–8, 9 William III, c. 33; pro, Land Revenue (hereafter lr) 1/31. Wood sales accounts for the New Forest in the period 1700–04 listed wood for making the enclosures according to the Act of 1698. There were allowances for viewing and setting out the ground for the enclosures. Ehrman, The Navy, 46. The New Forest supplied limited quantities of oak and beech to the royal dockyards; in the period 1691–96 the total was about 6,142 loads. Much of the timber from royal forests was exhausted by the time the Navy Board began the project to construct thirty ships in 1677. A forthcoming Oxford doctoral thesis by John Fawcett on Dean and the New Forest from 1660 to 1850 will no doubt provide more details about these plantation schemes and the response of those with rights to the forest commons. Albion, Forests and Sea Power, vii-viii. Holland, Ships of British Oak, 76–98. Fox, “English Naval Shipping”; Holland, Ships of British Oak; F. Fox, Great Ships: The Battlefleet of King Charles II (Greenwich, UK: Conway Maritime Press, 1980). Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 107–9. On the early modern river navigation and coasting trade, see T.S. Willan, The English Coasting Trade, 1600–1750 (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1967); T.S. Willan, River Navigation in England, 1600–1750 (London: Frank Cass, 1964). cspd, 1660–70. Hart, Royal Forest, 162–4; Harris, “Lydney ships,” 238–45.

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84 pro, Admiralty (hereafter adm) 106/3520. Furzer finished The Princess at Lydney on 27 August 1660, a fourth-rate ship of 602 tons. He completed the St David at Conpill on 30 March 1667, also fourth rate at 663 tons. On shipbuilding in Dean during the Interregnum, see Harris, “Lydney Ships,” 238–45; A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire, 1640– 1672 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), 199; Fox, “English Naval Shipping,” 277–8, 280, 284. 85 cspd, 1664–65, 36, 55, 67, 92, 107; Warmington, Civil War, 194; Harris, “Lydney Ships,” 242. 86 cspd, 1665–66, 435. 87 cspd, 1666–67, 596, 429. The Princess also had problems with shrinkage in 1662–63 because it was built of old timber and “laid green”; see cspd, 1663– 4, 78. Green timber was full of moisture because there was insufficient time for proper seasoning when ships were built and launched quickly. The fleet experienced similar problems during the eighteenth century with the navy’s rapid construction of ships; see C. Wilkinson, “British Politics, Government and the Navy before American Independence, 1763–1778” (PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1997), 265–9. 88 Warmington, Civil War, 194. 89 The cost of water carriage was much less than by land: a hoy, or small vessel, was able to carry about ten tons of timber compared with two or three tons by barge, and a wagon load was limited to one ton; see Ehrman, The Navy, 51. 90 O. Rackham, Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England (London: E. Arnold, 1980), 154. 91 pro, lrro 3/12. By means of a Treasury warrant of 17 August 1671, Robert Lee, one of the navy purveyors, sent planks to Portsmouth cut from sixty beech for His Majesty’s “new shipp there” (ibid.). 92 pro, adm 106/3538; Holland, Ships of British Oak, 71; Warmington, Civil War, 199. 93 cspd, 1660–70; cspd, 1668–69, 264; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 68, 107–8, 110–11. 94 Holland, Ships of British Oak, 71–5. Shipbuilder Daniel Furzer, who oversaw the Dean Forest project, was appointed as master shipwright at Portsmouth in 1672. 95 pro, adm 3/274, 139, 154, 158; pro, cres 6/5, 292–3. 96 Holland, Ships of British Oak, 74. Besides 600 trees in 1662, another 700 loads went from the forest in 1665, together with 60 beech for keel and flank pieces. The Portsmouth yard continued to receive loads of oak timber from this forest: 500 loads in 1666, 300 in 1667, and 330 in 1671. 97 pro, e 101/603/9; pro, cres 2/1673. 98 Albion, “The Timber Problem,” 15–16. Albion noted that repairing old ships and building a few new ships every year was more sensible, but Pepys risked

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105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

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losing the funds for new ships if he did not spend them. For a comparison of French navy building under Colbert, see P.W. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power, 1660–1789 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); J.L. Reed, Forests of France (London: Faber and Faber, 1951); J.C. Brown, French Forest Ordinance of 1669 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1883). Ehrman, The Navy, 46. The New Forest provided a steady stream of oaks but was not a major supplier of timber for the navy either in 1677 or in the 1690s. One report of 1675 referred to 3,700 trees just felled in the forest, from which purveyors estimated about 5,000 loads of timber for navy use; see pro, adm 1/3555, 275. Ehrman, The Navy, 51. Holland, Ships of British Oak, 76–95. On the navies of William III and Queen Anne, see Ehrman, The Navy; R.D. Merriman, ed., Queen Anne’s Navy: Documents Concerning the Administration of the Navy of Queen Anne, 1702–1714 (London: Navy Records Society, no. 103, 1861). pro, adm 106/402/178, 106/402/181, and 106/402/184. pro, lr 4/1/29, 30; ctb, 1699–1700, 231, 250. Holland, Ships of British Oak, 76–7. In 1688 the Portsmouth yard employed 350 men, compared with 800 in Chatham; by 1696 the two yards employed equal numbers, about 1,100 men. Calendar of Treasury Papers (hereafter ctp), 1702–07, 363. Ibid., 381, 400. Ibid., 406. See ibid. for the suggestion that only half the projected number of trees was sent to Portsmouth, or about 500. Ibid., 466. Ibid., 5 December 1706, 474–5. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1st ed., 1724–26; reprint, London: Penguin, 1986), 153. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 204; ctp, 1702–07, 213. To breem a ship is to clear the ship’s bottom of shells, seaweed, and the ooze, or mud, of river estuaries by singeing it with burning reeds or furze, softening the pitch so that the rubbish can be swept away; see The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), vol. 1, 1077. ctp, 1702–07, 487. Ibid., 488. Ibid., 509. On the rise of Bristol and Atlantic trade, see D.H. Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). cspd, 1663–1670. cspd, 1664–5, 121.

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120 On the Trent River system and its economy, see R.W. Unwin, “Trade and Transport in the Humber, Ouse and Trent Basins, 1660–1770” (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1971); J.D. Chambers, “The Vale of Trent: A Regional Study of Economic Change,” Economic History Review 3, supplement (1957): 2–63. 121 cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 81. 122 pro, sp 46/136/69, 70, 70A, 80, 237, 238. 123 cspd, 1663–8. 124 cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 85; pro, sp 29/94/70; J.D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Life and Labour under the Squirearchy (1st ed., 1938; 2nd ed., London: Frank Cass, 1966), 162. On the problems of water transportation in early modern England, see Willan, River Navigation; Willan, English Coasting Trade. 125 cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 81, 85, 145. 126 pro, sp 46/137/45; cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 275. Shaken timber has many cracks, a condition that affects overage trees. 127 Chambers, Nottinghamshire, 162; cspd, 1670, Addenda 1660–70, 5–7; pro, sp 29/282/9. 128 Chambers, Nottinghamshire, 162, cites pro, sp 29/284/154, as cited in cspd, 1670, but this reference makes no mention of Sherwood. Moreover, volumes of State Papers after 1670 rarely mention Sherwood and omit references to its naval supply. 129 Fourteenth Report, appendix 28, 61, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 78, 1792–93. 130 On the natural regeneration of oaks and some of the problems associated with regrowth and natural seeding of the species, see Rackham, Ancient Woodland, 294–7. 131 On the importance of bushes in the regeneration of oaks in the New Forest, see Fifth Report, 20, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. 132 Tubbs, New Forest, 155, suggests regeneration during the 1650s and 1660s in some of the unshaded parts of the New Forest on sites cleared of tree cover. 133 N. Flower, “The Management History and Structure of Unenclosed Woods in the New Forest, Hampshire,” Journal of Biogeography 7 (1980): 311–28. Beech was invading the oak woods and taking over by natural succession. 134 On the wood-pasture tradition, see Rackham, Trees and Woodlands, 135–65; L. Sharp, “Timber, Science and Economic Reform in the Seventeenth Century,” Forestry 48 (1975): 51–86. On the practice of natural regeneration in the New Forest, see G.F. Peterken and C.R. Tubbs, “Woodland Regeneration in the New Forest, Hampshire, since 1650,” Journal of Applied Ecology 2 (1965): 159–70; N. Flower, “An Historical and Ecological Study of Inclosed and Uninclosed Woods in the New Forest, Hampshire” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1977). On the failure of natural regeneration in English oak

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woods, see A.S. Watt, “On the Cause of Failure of Natural Regeneration in British Oakwoods,” Journal of Ecology 7 (1919): 173–203. Rackham, Trees and Woodlands, 48. cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 118. The density of timber oak in Birkland and Bilhagh was twenty-one oak per acre, which was above the statutory number of standard trees per acre. Ibid. Excluding grazers and browsers was always the problem within the royal forests, where royal deer roamed freely and forest commoners possessed grazing rights for their animals. Ibid.; pro, 30/24/31/6. cspd, Addenda 1660–85, 118. Fourteenth Report, 7–10, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 78, 1793. Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 44. Ibid. 229. Green timber was unseasoned and thus very moist, containing much sap. J.R. Tanner, ed., Pepys’ Memories of the Royal Navy, 1679–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 47. Dry rot was a fungal growth, described by Pepys, that thrived in warm, damp, and unventilated conditions; on dry rot in wooden ships, see Wilkinson, “British Politics, Government and the Navy,” 269–71. Tanner, ed., Pepys’ Memories, 39, 34. The rapid navy construction in the mideighteenth century resulted in similar problems, as demonstrated in Wilkinson, “British Politics,” ch. 8. cspd, 1670, Addenda 1660–70, 6. Ibid. Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 132; Third Report, 16, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. Third Report, 19, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. Ibid., 19–20, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. ctb, 1703, 278–9. vch, Hampshire, vol. 2, 451–2; Tubbs, New Forest, 155; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 132–3. The few enclosures in the eighteenth century were not well maintained. Tubbs, New Forest, 78. Eleventh Report, 10, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 77, 1792. Tubbs, New Forest, 129. Ibid., 78. N. Flower, “The Management History and Structure of Unenclosed Woods in the New Forest, Hampshire,” Journal of Biogeography 7, no. 4 (1980): 311–28 at 316. In 1608 there were 123,927 trees for the navy, but in 1707 only 12,476 were suitable for navy use.

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157 Ibid., 316; Fifth Report, appendix 32, 102–3, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787–90. Knees were cut from the intersections of large branches; these pieces were rare because the trees were grown in isolation to allow the branches to spread. 158 vch, Hampshire, vol. 2, 451–2; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 133; ctp, 1702–7, 474–5; 1729–30, 26; and 1731–34, 228, 249, 295; Calendar of Treasury Books and Papers, 1735–38, 185, 545. 159 Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 133. 160 Third Report, 19, reprinted in Lambert, ed., House of Commons, vol. 76, 1787– 90. 161 Ibid., 19–20. 162 pro, e 178/6080; Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 13, Samuel Pepys’s survey of 1671, 296–7. 163 Hart, Royal Forest, appendix 14, 298. 164 ctb, 1689–92, 586–7.

8 Plying the Northernmost Atlantic Trading Route to the New World The Hudson’s Bay Company and British Seaborne Empire 1 michael dove

The minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s London committee meeting for 20 December 1769 reported agreement that the sum of £10 10s be remitted to the artist John Hood “for a Picture of the Company’s Ships.”2 Depicted left to right in the drawing are the vessels King George, Seahorse, and Prince Rupert, commonly referred to by contemporaries as “Nor-west Men,” as the fleet weighed anchor from Gravesend on its annual outbound voyage to the company’s fur trading posts on the shores of Hudson Bay. The King George, the largest of the three ships, is shown firing a salute to the committee members who had assembled to conclude last-minute business before wishing captains and crews a prosperous voyage and safe return. Clearly discernible against the backdrop of the river to the right of the King George is the company’s house flag, featuring its beaver-studded coat-of-arms squarely set on a field of white. The smallest vessel of the fleet, the Seahorse, is positioned at centre, her elaborate figurehead facing the dock for a few final moments before shifting to starboard and riding in the wake of the King George. The Prince Rupert, the fourth company ship to bear the name of the business’s first governor, rounds out the scene. Launched only a month ago, she is eager to test her newly wedded timbers on the open sea. The image, measuring approximately eighteen by thirty-five inches, captured the animation and spirit of the occasion and most certainly commanded the attention of those attending weekly committee meetings and the annual General Court held at the company’s premises on Fenchurch Street in London. It was wholly appropriate that as the company’s first

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century of business was drawing to a close, the committee chose to adorn its meeting place with such a depiction. Since the Hudson’s Bay Company’s inception in 1670, its committee had channelled a great deal of energy and stockholders’ capital into ameliorating and securing direct sea links with the company’s overseas posts. The Hudson’s Bay Company lay claim by Royal charter to an immense area of northwest America known as Rupert’s Land. Its chief objective in this part of the New World was to operate a viable trade in furs. Although its grant covered almost 1.5 million square miles, until 1774 the company’s settled presence in this region was almost entirely restricted to a handful of coastal posts horseshoeing Hudson Bay and its southern extension of James Bay. These trading posts, serviced directly by ocean-going ships, relied on annual exchange visits by neighbouring Cree populations for their furs. Rather than extend its operations inland in response both to increasing French encroachment in the hinterland and to periodic charges at home that the company was hurting the nation’s interest by being conservative in its trading activities and negligent in fulfilling several terms of its charter, the company chose to focus on bay-side trade. Several theories have been advanced to explain the company’s persistence with this strategy, especially in the period after 1713 once France formally recognized British claims to Hudson Bay by the Treaty of Utrecht. A common assumption by eighteenth-century commentators and later historians was that company stockholders remained content with a stability in the trade that had first been achieved within a few years of the peace and that had continued for well over a halfcentury. Comfortable annual dividends, a product of the company’s renewal of trade on the west coast of Hudson Bay, and its monopoly over the fur market in Britain presumably stifled any incentive to move inland or to realize the region’s resource potential beyond pelts. Rooted in a damning mid-eighteenth-century report by a former and disgruntled bay-side servant, this explanation advanced the notion that the company was essentially engaged in a deep slumber for these years.3 Numerous modern studies have countered this assertion with evidence of the company’s use of innovative business practices and monitoring techniques that tightened metropolitan control and thereby lessened the overall risks of conducting long-distance overseas trade. As long as furs accumulated in the warehouses of the shore-based posts in satisfactory quantities each year, the company avoided the additional costs of administration, transportation, and labour that would have been involved in extensive inland ventures.4 Seriously overlooked or underestimated in all these analyses was the degree of diplomatic uncertainty present in the Atlantic world for much

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of the eighteenth century and its resounding effect on the scope and pattern of the fur trade in North America. For the Hudson’s Bay Company, expansion inland made little sense as long as the Bourbon powers, particularly France, remained a viable threat to Britain and her Atlantic colonies. Between 1682 and 1713, during years of both war and peace, the company suffered a series of French assaults on its posts and ships. The heavy costs associated with these attacks nearly ruined the company. Until 1763 this traumatic span of more than thirty years, combined with subsequent distress felt after Utrecht, sustained British doubts and anxieties over Bourbon intentions and capabilities for expansion in North America. The company’s response to this climate of insecurity was to safeguard its chief competitive advantage over the French in the trade: the sea route to Hudson Bay. The route of the “Nor-west Men” marked the northern rim of the Atlantic basin, which meant that ships entered climates and sailing conditions very different from those experienced by vessels operating in other Atlantic trades. Ships contended with severe cold and treacherous sea-ice conditions along a passage that was regulated by an extremely brief navigation season in Hudson Strait. By its very name, the Seahorse of Hood’s picture bore testimony to the peculiar nature of the route. The Atlantic walrus, historically referred to as a “sea horse,” was a common sight, and its tusks, called “sea horse teeth” by ships’ captains, were a much sought-after commodity as ships passed through the ice-lined shores of Hudson Strait each summer on their outbound voyages from London to Hudson Bay.5 Just as the walrus was the subject of some now-forgotten mystique in sailor lore, so this northern route was likewise either treated as a curiosity or neglected by both contemporaries and later historians. Further separated by its special status as a commercial colony protected by government charter, the Hudson’s Bay Company is still largely perceived as unusual and is thus commonly disregarded in studies of the Atlantic world.6 The marginal status accorded the company obscures its relevance to current scholarship. Although the fleet’s destination and the type of overseas business organization that it represented were uncharacteristic of those trades of higher value and volume that operated further south,7 the “Nor-west Men” were three-masted frigates averaging just over 200 tons each and, as such, typified the workhorse vessel of the eighteenth-century Atlantic maritime world.8 Furthermore, through the increased regularity of their movements, the greater sophistication of their handling, and their improved safety record, they exemplified the vital role that shipping performed in generating and preserving the British Atlantic, which was predominantly, at least until the end of the Seven Years’ War, a seaborne empire.

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The company’s devotion to a maritime strategy in the eighteenth century was an effective response to the geopolitical environment of the period and proved congruent with the broader British imperial objective of accessing the Americas and protecting the region from European rivals with minimal cost to the home government. Success hinged not only on the company’s determination of a sailing route and schedule that appreciated the particular challenges of the navigation, but also on its further minimization of hazards by improving such tools as maps, charts, and instruments and by shouldering the bulk of the trade’s defence costs. The accumulation of specialized navigational and geographical knowledge was a lengthy process, and it eventually became one of the company’s most valuable assets. The company jealously guarded its secrets from all forms of competition, which served the dual purpose of strengthening its trade monopoly and helping to secure British control over these northern waters. This chapter is concerned with delineating some of the central features of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s maritime strategy with respect to the changing geopolitical situation of the Atlantic world. An awareness of the challenges and responses of a seemingly fringe Atlantic trade may assist in a reappraisal of the possibilities and limitations of British seaborne empire in the eighteenth century. The European imperial struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were at least as much contests to control oceanic space as they were efforts to promote land-based empire.9 Although each European nation continued to redefine its ideology with respect to overseas empire, France and England in particular initially considered their Atlantic colonies to be valuable bases for trade.10 These commercial bases were most likely to succeed when located within easy reach of ships; thus those participating in overseas trade poured their energy and capital into establishing and protecting coastal trading outposts and their seaward approaches.11 In time, these outposts would fulfil essential roles in securing land-based empire, but their survival for the interim relied entirely on regular servicing by ocean-going vessels. As one historian of Western overseas empire put it, the trading base was “an entering wedge from which territorial empires were to spread later,” and it was an advantage in sea power that enabled these bases to remain effective and protected from other European powers.12 Sea power traditionally referred to a nation’s naval capability, and studies of Britain as the foremost sea power in Europe in the eighteenth century focus almost exclusively on the roles of the Royal Navy and on the establishment of overseas naval bases.13 Although navies clearly played a tremendous role in securing seaborne empire, the preservation of overseas bases owed much to the growth in the regular

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movement of goods, people, and information across the world’s oceans by those merchants and trading companies involved in oceanic trade. Thanks in large part to the growth and sophistication of merchant shipping over the eighteenth century, Britain was eventually able to assert its claims of sovereignty over vast areas of the New World and to exercise control over the seas. Whether at war or peace, England, France, and Spain closely monitored each other’s movements in the Atlantic world and reacted accordingly. Overseas posts became targets in European wars, as nations not only jockeyed for leverage in treaty negotiations, but also sought positions of strategic importance. Navies were unable to ensure protection and proved far more effective when confined to home waters, which often left overseas posts vulnerable to foreign attack and prompted those trading there to adapt various means of defending their interests. This was the international environment in which the Hudson’s Bay Company operated. The company’s charter granted it “the sole Trade and Commerce of all those Seas Streightes Bayes Rivers Lakes Creekes and Soundes in whatsoever Latitude they shall bee that lye within the entrance of the Streightes commonly called Hudsons Streightes.”14 Whereas the charter only provided a vague definition of the company’s territorial limits in the region, owing to the initial lack of geographical knowledge about northwest America, it specifically designated the mouth of Hudson Strait as the point at which its claims commenced. Reference in the charter to all waterways found within this entrance, including the strait itself, was evidence of the company’s and the Crown’s intention to command this northern oceanic space. Both England and France lay title to the region, and the potential for conflict between them over its control soon arose once the company began sending ships to the bay. French officials had been monitoring English interest in the region since the late 1660s, when French explorers Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, began seeking support from the English Crown for their proposal to establish a fur trade at Hudson Bay via an ocean route.15 The French regarded Hudson Bay as a natural extension of the Upper Country, which had come into its possession by means of Samuel de Champlain’s discoveries earlier in the century, and since that time the French had made at least three unsuccessful attempts to reach Hudson Bay.16 In 1670 French minister Jean Baptiste Colbert hired Dutch navigator Laurens Van Heemskerk to lead a seaborne expedition to Hudson Bay in order to establish a foothold in the territory. Although the voyage was a failure, the generous support offered it by the French Crown demonstrated the strategic value of Hudson Bay to France: not

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only did the region promise a rich supply of pelts, but its possession could thwart English intentions of encasing the St Lawrence Valley from both the north and the south.17 The Hudson’s Bay Company claimed English rights to the region based on first discovery, citing early English expeditions to the bay and the more recent voyage by Zachariah Gillam in 1668. Although each side formally presented its case in a series of petitions in 1687 aimed at driving one another out of the region entirely,18 the previous decade and a half was spent jockeying for position using a range of methods very familiar to those experienced in European overseas territories. Occupation became the prime criterion for recognizing territorial entitlement. In 1672, 1674, and 1679 trading parties from Quebec made overland treks to James Bay in bids both to intercept the trade flowing north to the company’s forts and to reconnoitre the forts themselves.19 Jean Talon, intendant general of New France, responded to the company’s efforts to hem in New France by expanding trade to the western interior and by eventually pushing for the formation of the Compagnie du Nord in 1682, a French fur company with monopoly trading rights in the region.20 Alarmed by the movements of French traders in James Bay and by the success in luring Radisson and des Groseilliers into the service of France in 1675, the governor and the committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company requested that the Crown assist the company’s defence of its rights and investments in the region. Its petition of 26 January 1676 complained that the French had pulled down His Majesty’s ensigns in the absence of the company’s ships, those ensigns representing England’s claim to the “Midland Sea of North-West America.”21 The Crowns of neither France nor England desired conflict with one another in these years. Consequently, the company quickly realized that to strengthen its territorial claims, grow its business, and protect its interests against future French encroachment, it had to build permanent bay-side posts and to establish and maintain effective seaborne communications with them. In sailing time and distance, the posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company were the most remote from London of all other English Atlantic outposts, as ships averaged twelve weeks on the outbound passage and six on the return.22 From London’s River Thames, company ships made their way into the North Atlantic by sailing either west through the English Channel or north around Scotland. Once the domestic leg of the voyage was complete, ships set a course for Cape Farewell on the southernmost point of Greenland. To avoid the immense masses of ice moving southwest along the East Greenland Current, ships steered well to the south of the cape and then north-northwest to make the Island of

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Resolution marking the upper entrance to Hudson Strait. The length of time that it took ships to sail to Hudson Bay was grossly dependent on the time that it took them to sail the strait. As Hudson Strait was passable to ships for a mere eight to twelve weeks per year between the middle of July and early October, the period between break-up and freeze-up, ships had to time all legs of the passage carefully in order to minimize the risk of being frozen in the strait or forced to overwinter in the bay. Ships could at best make one return voyage to Hudson Bay each year, an objective that the company pursued in earnest with a safe, reliable ocean route and sailing schedule. The company completed its first same-year return voyage to Hudson Bay in 1676. The Shaftesbury sailed to and from James Bay in six months, a period stretching from late May to early November. The absence of war, and even the serious threat of it, was clearly a factor enabling the committee to outfit its ships and get them away earlier in the season than had been the case in 1672 and 1674, when shipping was delayed because of the third Anglo-Dutch War.23 Some of the credit must also be attributed to the Shaftesbury’s captain, Joseph Thompson, as the company awarded him “a Medall & Chayn” for his efforts.24 His journal of the voyage detailed the timetable on which the same-year return trip occurred, thus becoming a valuable resource for both the committee and future captains. Its significance as a guide in navigation or even as a model on which to base a sailing schedule was reflected in its unique whereabouts, being the only journal of a company voyage entrusted to the care of Prince Rupert, the company’s first governor.25 The 1676 shipping milestone was an important step in accomplishing the company’s objective of realizing regular transportation and communication with its overseas posts. The Shaftesbury’s achievement proved far from an anomaly in the history of the company’s shipping, as same-year return voyages were made for two of the next three years. In an ironic twist, the lone failure in 1678 was the Shaftesbury, which was wrecked off the Scilly Isles on its homeward leg just days short of returning to port.26 Especially striking was the record of shipping for the next century, during which at least one ship made the annual return voyage to Hudson Bay in eighty of the following ninety-eight years. Ships were forced to winter in Hudson Bay in only four instances after 1676, the last occurring in 1715.27 The majority of the cases in which annual return voyages could not be made took place before then and can be traced to the disruptive effects of the French in Rupert’s Land between 1682 and 1713. The company’s efforts to attain regular voyages were initially disrupted and then almost completely stalled by the temporary expansion of the French Atlantic into Hudson Bay. As mentioned, the French did

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not recognize the company’s rights to the region and by 1682 took measures to dislodge the English. This initiative began with a seaborne expedition, led by former company employee Pierre Esprit Radisson, then in the service of the Compagnie du Nord, which ultimately led to the loss of the company’s senior captain, his ship, and the company’s fort of Port Nelson on the west coast of the bay. The hostilities spurred a series of aggressive peacetime exchanges between the company and the French in the bay, leading to the aforementioned airing of their grievances in 1687.28 Despite agreeing to a truce, both parties sent expeditions to Hudson Bay in the spring of 1688 in efforts to bolster their respective bay-side positions. The company sent two ships to resettle the post at Albany in James Bay and to spend the winter there assisting in its protection. The attempt was quashed the next summer by French naval commander Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, a vigorous proponent of establishing a French maritime approach to the fur trade, who captured three company ships, the factory sloop, and a shallop.29 The company’s prospects were further jeopardized in 1689, as the Glorious Revolution initiated a lengthy war that further hampered the company’s attempts to strengthen its position in Hudson Bay. The Nine Years’ War (1689–97), or King William’s War, as it was known in the American colonies, saw the company and France swap bay-side posts several times and was certainly a disincentive for the company to continue its newfound post further up the west coast of the bay at Churchill. State assistance was also short-lived, for the Royal Navy committed ships in support of the company’s efforts in the bay only twice prior to the nineteenth century, in 1696 and 1697. The expedition of 1697 was nearly a complete disaster for the company and a heavy setback for any English hopes of commanding the region. York Fort, previously called Port Nelson and located approximately ninety miles south-east of Churchill on the bay’s west coast, was lost again to the French after the company had captured it only the previous year. In addition to the fort, the French captured one of the company’s ships, forced the other from the bay, thereby depriving posts in James Bay of supplies, and sank one of the naval escort ships. The other Royal Navy vessel was crushed by ice as she attempted the westward passage through the strait.30 In total, the company lost eight ships to the French between 1685 and 1697.31 The company thus generally fared poorly in these engagements, and its affairs only worsened when the Treaty of Ryswick confined its hold on the bay to just one fort, at Albany. The period between 1697 and 1713 was easily the most dismal in the company’s history. Still reeling from the series of French raids on its forts and ships, difficulties were compounded by a steep decline in fur markets and a sharp rise in the

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costs of ships, crews, and insurance. An entry in the journal of the Council of Trade and Plantations, dated 20 January 1702, stated that: “the losses which they [the hbc] have sustained by the French in those parts, not only in time of war, but also in peace, have been so very great that they are scarce able to carry on any trade thither.”32 Scarce, indeed, for the committee did not send any ships to the bay in six different years between 1695 and 1709.33 Perhaps the only consolation was that the French barely presided in the bay from 1702 to 1713 and attempted to take the company’s fort at Albany just once, in 1709.34 This is not to say that, for most of the war, the committee in London did not fear a final French assault aimed at shutting the company out of the region altogether. Besides securing Albany Fort and protecting its shipping, the committee ultimately desired to restore the company’s grip on the bay. To accomplish these goals, state assistance was absolutely necessary. Despite repeated requests, naval support was not forthcoming, as the Royal Navy could not spare vessels for such far-flung actions and committed ships to only a desperate few overseas operations during the war. Consequently, company ships found themselves going it alone for most of their voyages. Ships managed to obtain some measure of protection from naval convoys assembled for the fisheries and Russian trade, but these often resulted in lengthy delays on the outbound passage and, at least twice, accounted for late arrivals in the bay and ships being forced to overwinter.35 The company’s trading position in Hudson Bay was so tenuous in these decades that the region was accorded very minor significance in terms of “the Empire.” In The British Empire in America, appearing in 1708, John Oldmixon relegated his description of Hudson Bay to the end of volume 1, stating: “The History of Hudson’s Bay will not afford us much Matter. The Settlements are too inconsiderable, to deserve much Pains to be taken about them.”36 Despite Oldmixon’s verbal slight, his work included a map insert by Dutch cartographer Hermann Moll that featured Hudson Bay and the company’s forts as the northern limits of British settlement in America and depicted them in relation not only to the British American Empire, but also to the French and Spanish possessions in America. Moll’s “A New Map of North America” provided stark recognition of the competing imperial agendas of Britain, France, and Spain in the Americas and accentuated the importance of maps and their careful measurement and production in influencing geopolitical thinking. A later version of Moll’s map was used to support British claims in settling boundary disputes with France in the years following Utrecht.37 From its earliest days, the Hudson’s Bay Company appreciated the value of producing its own maps and charts of Hudson Strait and

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Hudson Bay rather than continuing to rely on those composed from previous English voyages.38 The manufacture of accurate and reliable visual aids depended on careful mensuration, which could only be realized over time and through a sustained presence in the region. For much of the company’s first half-century, the need for in-house maps and charts went unmet due to the unavailability of able practitioners and the momentous disruptions to the company’s position in the bay by the French. Yet up to 1713 the company did commission the production of at least sixteen maps and charts of the region, fourteen of these from prominent commercial chart makers and cartographers based in London, such as John Thornton and his son Samuel.39 These men composed “official” renditions of Hudson Bay, intended for reference in treaty talks to further the company’s claims, as in 1701 and 1709.40 Maps were obviously critical in defending claims at the negotiating table. Once high diplomacy began in earnest, the company sent several petitions to the Crown requesting that the French pay restitution for the “robberies” committed by them during peacetime. These petitions also underlined that Hudson Bay’s strategic importance to the nation was not only territorial, but also seaborne: “if the French come once to be intirely possessed of Hudsons Bay They will undoubtedly sett up a whale fishing in those parts, which will greatly tend to the Encrease of their Navigation and to their breed of Seamen.”41 The company’s bid for a favourable peace was successful, as the treaty ending the war returned the entire drainage basin of Hudson Bay to the English company’s control. The Treaty of Utrecht contained several articles pertaining to Hudson Bay. Besides restoring it to the Hudson’s Bay Company, France was obliged to compensate the company for all damages inflicted in peacetime. Commissaries for both sides were to be named within a year for this purpose as well as to negotiate a boundary line essentially partitioning the territory lying in the Upper Country between the company and France, therefore clarifying the extent of each nation’s American colonies.42 The company delivered a memorial to the Lord Commissioners of Trade and Plantations on 4 August 1714, which described its desired territorial limits and contained an abstract of the damages sustained by the French in times of peace between 1682 and 1688, amounting to the considerable sum of £100,543 13s 9d.43 France proved less than expeditious in meeting these terms. By 1719 it had met only the provision that formally restored Hudson Bay to the company, with almost no attention devoted to the other two stipulations. The company’s frustration over these unresolved issues was evident in its memorial to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations in August of that year. The company restated the estimate and outline

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of its losses to the French and acquainted the commissioners with news of vigorous French trading activity since 1715 around a newly established French fort at the head of the Albany River, which was essentially draining the company’s principal fort of its annual trade.44 Later that year, correspondence between the company’s governor, then stationed in Paris, and the committee in London indicated that the French felt little sense of urgency in addressing these concerns. A letter from the committee members in London to the governor dated 12 November 1719 stated that they had received his letters pertaining to this business and that “Wee Could not but Expect an Aversion in The French to Comply with ye Article of Utricht, Particularly in yt Part which Relates to pay moneys for former Damages Done Us.”45 Although satisfied with official French recognition of its claims, those directing the company were still understandably restrained in their exuberance over the peace. Although Britain and France were officially at peace between 1713 and 1744, none in either country could forecast the continuance of such amicable relations. The entente was vigorously supported by prominent ministers in both countries, but mutual suspicion arose and served to accelerate each nation’s commerce and trading capacity overseas.46 In the decades following Utrecht, the Comte de Maurepas oversaw steady expansion of the French navy and the establishment and strengthening of France’s overseas positions.47 The British Admiralty remained well aware of the naval replenishing programs of France and Spain, paying particular attention to Bourbon attempts to consolidate their positions overseas around fortified bases. While officials could feel confident in Britain’s naval capability, the lack of a clear objective and role for the Royal Navy overseas produced a naval strategy that was primarily concerned with guarding England from invasion.48 In the 1730s Britain founded Georgia as a buffer colony between its American colonies and those of the Spanish, thus partly addressing the escalating overseas threat.49 The trend that British officials perhaps most feared, however, was that French colonial commerce began to outdistance its own, for between 1735 and 1755 French ship traffic expanded exponentially and the value of French overseas trade doubled.50 These developments caused great unease among merchants and trading companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company, which witnessed a revitalized French trade in the northwest interior of North America. The committee in London increasingly received alarming reports of French wood-runners intercepting Amerindian trading parties on their way to the bay’s coast, “stirring up the Indians” to attack the company’s establishments, and probing the defences of the forts.51 In

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1732 the governor at Albany Fort relayed an account of a French trader and his slave who appeared at the company’s forts at Moose River and Albany. The committee, being very suspicious of the travellers’ intentions, wrote in its annual letter to the governor the next year: “Wee make no doubt but their design was to make what observations they Could of the Strength & Nature of the Fort & Situation & to prie as far as possible into ye Secrets and Method of ye Trade.”52 The committee alerted its other governors in Hudson Bay to keep a strict watch for such activity and never to allow strangers beyond the gates nor to discuss any matters pertaining to the trade or situation of the forts.53 The committee was not willing to assume that either the Treaty of Utrecht or the forbidding climate and geography of the northern shipping route were protection enough. Once the company regained Hudson Bay, it thus proceeded cautiously over the following decades to expand its trading activities. The immediate objective was to reestablish the trade at York Fort by forging new relationships with the Cree and by constructing a new trading post. This proved easier to address than another damaging blow caused by the lengthy period of French control: the suspension of the company’s regular navigation on the bay’s west coast. For the two decades immediately preceding 1713, the company’s shipping movements had been predominantly restricted to Hudson Bay’s southernmost reaches, thereby disrupting the company’s attempts at both mapping and charting the coast and waters of the rest of the bay. By 1713 none of the company’s captains possessed sailing experience in the western part of Hudson Bay. The deficiencies in sailing experience on the bay’s west coast and of recent surveys of these waters were apparent from the alarming number of wrecks and mishaps of company vessels in the vicinity of York Fort between 1714 and 1719. This region of coastline, which would eventually become home to the company’s principal factory on Hudson Bay, was a low slip of land bordered on the north by the Nelson River and on the south by the Hayes River and was infested with shoals that extended for a considerable distance offshore. Navigating the approach to this isthmus required an experienced captain. In addition to the wrecks of the Eastmain sloop off Hayes River in a storm in 1714 and of the Hudson’s Bay on the shoals off nearby Cape Tatnum in 1719, the company suffered from a number of other navigational blunders during this painful process of becoming reacquainted with the navigation.54 Only one year before the wreck of the Hudson’s Bay, the Mary ran aground in a storm on its return voyage from York Fort and was forced to return to Hayes River for major repairs. The news of the near loss of the Mary assuredly caused sufficient alarm in the committee that year, for it was still haunted by the unsuccessful voyage of

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the Hudson’s Bay to York Fort in 1715. In that year, Captain Joseph Davis was unable to locate the entrance to Hayes River due to heavy weather. After sailing up and down the coast within several miles of York Fort for eighteen days, he aborted the voyage and steered home for London, thus failing to deliver both much-needed provisions to the post and the expected rich cargoes of furs to London.55 An extremely busy era of charting coastal areas and river estuaries followed, as employees became more experienced in navigation due to the company’s sustained presence in all parts of the bay after 1713. A renewed emphasis on efficiency and consistency in all administrative and operational affairs eventually reformed company shipping. The committee was emphatic that the company’s ships run on time, and within a few years of Utrecht they did. Between 1716 and 1774 the company’s record in achieving annual return voyages to Hudson Bay was nearly flawless. Out of a total of 183 expeditions sent to the bay in the fifty-nine years between 1716 and 1774, 178 ships (or 97%) made it there and home. No ships were forced to overwinter in Hudson Bay, and only one ship was ordered to stay at a post until the next year, although the stopover was unrelated to a delay in scheduling.56 The other four cases in which a ship did not make the return voyage were all due to shipwreck, with only two of those in any respect attributable to the sailing schedule. The loss of ships in both 1727 and 1736 occurred in years of heavy ice on the approach to Hudson Strait early in the season.57 As the entire sailing schedule was geared to the expected annual break-up times of the strait, the multiple legs of the outbound voyage were coordinated to better meet the perceived fluctuations in climate. Ships were consistently ordered north-about via Stromness in the Orkney Islands on their outbound voyages after 1731. This port of call not only regulated the pace of the westward leg to the mouth of Hudson Strait, but also satisfied several other requirements of the voyage such as supplies of provisions, fresh water, and labour. The remarkable record of achieving same-year return voyages to Hudson Bay was commented on at mid-century: “what was once represented as absolutely impracticable is now very easily and speedily performed; and it is with great reluctance that any captain winters in the Bay.”58 Lengthier tenures by competent ships’ captains certainly helped to perfect the sailing schedule and to make for a safer route. Prior to Utrecht, ships made 78 voyages to Hudson Bay under the command of 33 different captains for an average of 2.4 voyages per captain. This number more than tripled for the period 1714 to 1774, when 26 captains commanded ships to Hudson Bay 190 times for an average of 7.3 voyages each. Persistence in the company’s service noticeably ballooned after 1730, for only 13 captains were responsible for an average

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11.1 voyages each over 144 expeditions.59 By the second decade of the eighteenth century, most company captains spent the bulk of their lifetimes in the trade, building up an accumulation of valuable navigational knowledge. George Spurrell was the longest-serving captain in the history of the company’s shipping service, making thirty-five voyages to Hudson Bay between 1722 and 1756 without ever losing a vessel or even suffering a serious mishap. The senior captain by 1727, Spurrell acted as mentor for other eventual veterans of the route, including his son Joseph, who traversed the North Atlantic to Hudson Bay thirteen times for the company from 1751 to 1763.60 Promotions to captain were made from within and based on connections of kinship, as sons were apprenticed to their fathers. Commands were not purchased, as they were in the East India service, but in most cases were won by families, a common trend in overseas shipping in this period.61 For instance, the Fowlers, John, Jonathan, and Jonathan, Jr, combined for a remarkable run of forty-one voyages between 1744 and 1774.62 Experience was obviously invaluable, and the committee readily appreciated their captains as exceptional resources. On top of their industry-average salaries of six pounds a month for the full year, captains were given regular gratuities, which during wartime could amount to over £90 annually. A consistent gratuity during years of war and peace was the £50 awarded each captain for making a same-year return voyage to the bay.63 Occupying the roles of “master” and “commander,” a company captain was responsible both for a ship’s navigation and for its regular handling. Captains learned how to guide their ships through the ice fields to avoid the most hazardous of conditions. An ability to “read” the wide variety of sea ice was central to deciding when to enter Hudson Strait and when to lie to or grapple to a large floe in anticipation of dangerous quantities or fast-moving masses. One company captain categorized the ice into three types: immense icebergs; large, heavy ice that is moved rather suddenly by the tides, thus posing the most danger to ships; and less menacing, small ice, through which ships could tack and make forward progress.64 Captains became adept at navigating the icy waters and staying clear of the most threatening masses. The ability of captains over time to steer their ships clear of most dangers and to make regular return voyages to Hudson Bay was also largely due to the accessibility and effective use of navigational instruments. Evidence of company ships being equipped with both new and newly invented instruments over this first century casts much doubt on previous assertions that no significant navigational aids appeared in the bay until the early nineteenth century.65 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the basic tools of navigation – the ship’s compass,

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lead line, and chart – were supplemented with the azimuth compass and the Davis quadrant.66 The azimuth compass continued to be serviceable to company captains throughout the eighteenth century, whereas the Davis quadrant was almost immediately replaced by the Hadley quadrant, or octant, when it was first made available in 1731.67 The Elton quadrant, which came on the market one year after the Hadley model and which was used by company captains in tandem with the latter into the 1760s, provided fairly reliable altitude readings when the horizon was not visible, as was often the case in the hazy, fogshrouded waters of Hudson Strait and the bay.68 In 1769 company ships were guided in their movements over the Atlantic using John Harrison’s method of finding one’s position at sea.69 The company’s use of these advanced instruments improved the accuracy of observations recorded over the Atlantic route, such that ships’ logbooks increasingly became better guides for future captains lacking sailing experience on this northern sea passage. Christopher Middleton, commander in the company’s service from 1725 to 1740, was very much a pioneer among sea captains of the period. He was among the first to use both the Smith Quadrant and the Hadley Quadrant in the 1730s to measure the altitudes of the stars and the sun in order to determine a ship’s position at sea.70 Middleton attempted to solve the difficulties inherent in finding true north with a compass by collecting observations of the magnetic needle’s variation on his voyages to the bay between 1721 and 1725. In 1726 his “New and Exact table” of these findings was published by the Royal Society, which eventually made him a Society Fellow for his work in this field.71 Middleton also made use of the fifteen-foot Smith refracting telescope, which aided in his observations of latitude, longitude, and the declination of the magnetic needle at Prince of Wales Fort in Churchill. He lobbied for outfitting ships with the instrument, recommending its use on ships at sea to get a true time of the day or night.72 Once captains became acquainted with the special challenges of the sailing route and schedule to Hudson Bay, there were no more wrecks and remarkably few serious mishaps to company ships in these waters. Regular voyages brought experience to captains and consistency to navigation, their lessons bound up in their vessels’ logbooks, which were then made available to future company captains. The logs were supplemented with updated charts of the ever-changing underwater geography of the river estuaries, thus producing a body of knowledge of inestimable value to the company. As Ian Steele remarked: “Improved safety in sailing into Hudson Bay was one dramatic illustration of the victory of accumulated knowledge over a most treacherous new English Atlantic route.”73

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Forging direct, reliable sea links to Hudson Bay also required that the company be prepared to defend both its posts and ships from enemy attack. As previously discussed, the committee heeded its preUtrecht lessons. Defence of its trade was considered from a maritime perspective since it was expected that any French incursion on its posts and ships would take the form of a naval siege. If there was any comfort in the peace, it was short-lived, for the committee almost immediately took pains to organize for the possibility of war. In its general letter to Albany Fort in 1716, the committee asked for confirmation of the numbers and names of men there and also requested that the next year’s ship to the fort signal its arrival in order to avoid surprise, “for tho’ we are still in peace, yet things seem still precarious as to Peace or Warr, & therefore Wee hope we need not Caution you to be upon your Gard at all times.”74 After 1716 the committee not only instructed its captains to train passengers and crew in how to exercise small arms while on the outbound voyage, but also authorized them to pay a specified ransom to the enemy if their ships and cargoes were in fact taken. Upon arriving at their destinations, captains were also to make certain that posts were not in enemy hands prior to bringing their ships within range of the shore guns, and a system of prearranged signals was established for use in both wartime and peacetime.75 Such preventive measures remained in place throughout the period of peace. The company also sought to shore up its position on the bay by fortifying its posts. Its principal base at York Fort was almost entirely constructed to defend it from sea attack. Landing troops on this section of the coast was extremely difficult, so the fort focused its guns on the sea approach to Five Fathom Hole, the only safe anchorage from which ships could fire into the fort. The extent to which York Fort’s defences concentrated on the bay is evident in a former engineer’s charge that one six-pounder fired at the fort from the land side would be sufficient to drive the company’s men either to surrender or to abandon it.76 Within a few years of resuming control of York Fort, the company looked northward to Churchill River as a site for a new post. The area was favoured for its proximity to several Athapaskan tribes, such as the Chipewyan, as well as for its potential as a base from which the company could conduct a fishery for black whales and a maritime trade with the Inuit populations farther north. Additionally, a base at Churchill assisted in sailing expeditions mounted for the purpose of seeking a northwest passage.77 Prince of Wales Fort, as it was known from 1719, was strategically positioned to protect all the company’s possessions in the bay, its shipping route, and its hold on the region itself. Rocky cliffs bound the third-of-a-mile entrance to Churchill River on the west, not far from where the fort lay, and on the east, where the

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battery of Cape Merry was located. These two installations guarded a fine harbour, which afforded ships the deepest and most sheltered anchorage anywhere on Hudson Bay. Long-time company employee James Knight, who had resurrected York Fort within a few short years of Utrecht, provided directions and a draught of the region in his packet to London in 1716, a year before Churchill was officially established, in which he praised the coastal approaches and the superb harbour there.78 Churchill assumed a greater role in the company’s maritime operation as its stone fortress, Prince of Wales Fort, underwent construction after 1731, a process that involved several stages and used various models. Among its main objectives from the very beginning was to block enemy ships from entering the harbour and to offer shelter to those vessels inside it.79 Captains George Spurrell and Christopher Middleton were tremendously valuable both in preparing designs and models of the proposed fort at Churchill and in strengthening the navigation of this route through maps of Churchill River.80 No company ships were ever lost at or near Churchill, the most northerly and safest overseas port on the Atlantic route to Hudson Bay. The purpose behind Prince of Wales Fort puzzled contemporaries and later historians. Critics quite correctly claimed that the fort was not well built or adequately manned to fulfil its supposed role of defending the bay from enemy attack. Because its environs could not support a large resident population, it was believed by some that incoming ships’ crews, whose complements were increased in wartime, were responsible for manning the defence of the fort and for protecting the harbour and approaches.81 Prince of Wales Fort existed primarily to secure the company’s maritime presence in Hudson Bay, on which its fur trading business physically rested, and it could do this without bankrupting the company. Establishing and maintaining a British bastion in the north similar to French Louisbourg would have been too expensive and wholly unnecessary. Consequently, the committee assumed an approach not unlike that of France and Spain; secure land bases were expected to allow Britain to exercise seaborne control over the region. However, just as Louisbourg did not actually protect Canada from seaborne attack despite the claims of Maurepas, it appears that Prince of Wales Fort was not the fortress that it was popularly conceived to be.82 Major differences obviously existed between the forts of Louisbourg and Prince of Wales, not the least of which was that the former was misconceived by the French themselves as a bulwark of French America, whereas the latter was constructed by the Hudson’s Bay Company to create an illusion of impregnability. Joseph Robson, who served as chief mason and overseer of construction at York Fort and Prince of Wales Fort between 1733 and 1736 and

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again from 1744 to 1747, became one of the company’s fiercest critics by the middle of the eighteenth century. He directly attacked the company’s privileged position in the trade, supporting instead highly influential figures in Parliament, such as Arthur Dobbs. Dobbs had been levelling accusations against the company since the early 1730s, which had finally led to a Parliamentary Inquiry into the company’s rights in 1749.83 Robson castigated the company for its incompetent building program at Prince of Wales Fort, claiming that it was conducted in a haphazard fashion, often with poor materials and inferior workmanship and with complete disregard for plans and advice given by experts. He also took issue with the company’s statement of expenses issued during the inquiry, which gave a figure of between £30,000 and £40,000 spent on Prince of Wales Fort over the previous two decades. This sum differed substantially from the detailed estimate of labour and materials provided by Robson, which amounted to no more than £8,000.84 Evidently, the company was not required to submit its ledger books to the inquiry, for they did not support the company’s claims of cost overruns. Rather, the figures tended to support Robson’s estimate since there was no noticeable jump in spending on Prince of Wales Fort compared with the other posts in the bay and since there were very few entries relating to anything apart from what could be deemed normal operating expenses.85 Robson’s journal reveals the company’s chief design in building such a high-profile fort in Hudson Bay. Robson alleged that the fort was constructed to give the appearance of the company’s commitment to the region, an objective that he narrowly construed as deterring interlopers and fending off accusations at home of inactivity and conservatism. To help prove his point, Robson paraphrased Captain George Spurrell’s comments on the company’s reasoning behind their efforts there: “the Company had not the well-being of the fort at heart, but desired the name more than the thing itself.”86 Robson was of course partly right in his assertion. The company undoubtedly wanted to portray its business in the bay as extremely risky and expensive in order to dissuade others in Britain from pursuing an interest. There was a wider concern for the company not at all acknowledged by Robson in his attack. The impetus behind the fort was the alarming situation with respect to Bourbon Europe, which the company felt was much more immediate and potentially devastating to its business than any early rumblings at home about opening up navigation to Hudson Bay. The committee began to consider erecting a fort at Churchill in the 1720s, not in the 1730s in response to accusations by Arthur Dobbs. Actual construction on the fort was scheduled for 1731, at least two years before Dobbs made his initial waves. Once construction began

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from the original plans, the committee realized that it would prove far too expensive and protracted to build and maintain. By 1734 the committee felt that a scaled-down version would suffice and modified its instructions to the governor at Churchill. Any questions were to be directed to Captain George Spurrell, “who can explain any thing in either of the said Draughts, w:ch you wou’d be informed about, because Wee have several times discoursed with him upon this matter and he perfectly knows our Intentions herein.”87 The company felt that the presence of a fortress on the bay would deter French officials from sending an expedition there or at least give them cause for serious reconsideration. The company wanted to dispel any French hopes for a quick and easy campaign in Hudson Bay to capture British possessions for use as leverage in treaty negotiations. The specialized navigation to Hudson Bay, its dangerous reputation, and the presence of a fort purported to be Louisbourg’s equivalent certainly fed French doubts over the feasibility of a mission there. The company’s hold on the bay was therefore deceptively small, but it forced French designs to assume a larger commitment of ships and men than was actually necessary. The ploy worked, at least until 1782 when the Comte de La Pérouse took three French warships and 300 men to Hudson Bay and captured and destroyed both Prince of Wales Fort and York Fort without resistance. Even within sight of the fort at Churchill that year, French commanders were struck by its formidable appearance, and La Pérouse was compelled to land half his force to learn of the fort’s true nature.88 Parliament appreciated the company’s role in securing British seaborne empire in the northern seas, as the inquiry of 1749 ultimately ruled in the company’s favour. A convincing majority in the House of Commons believed that the Hudson’s Bay Company had been an effective champion of the national interest amid stiff French competition by concentrating on improving business at its coastal factories and resisting costly and difficult expansion inland.89 The previous two decades had shown that Bourbon Europe was still a powerful presence overseas and that retaining control over the northern sea route could prove extremely valuable to Britain.90 Since the 1730s the French had established a line of posts from the Great Lakes to the Prairies in hope of securing French transcontinental rights in North America, thanks in large part to the efforts of Pierre Gaultier de Larennes de La Vérendrye and his sons.91 Every new post was therefore a challenge not only to the Hudson’s Bay Company, but also to British imperial aims in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Within a year of the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739, the Admiralty under First Lord Sir Charles Wager launched naval offensives

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against Spain in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, thereby marking a radical departure from naval policy of the previous three decades, which had strictly held a defensive posture.92 By December 1740, Wager indicated that plans to take the naval war to the Pacific via the northwest Atlantic were also in place. The chief aims of the 1741–42 expedition were to locate a sailing route to the Pacific Ocean from the northern part of Hudson Bay and to explore the west coast of North America. Once the passageway was found, a larger naval force would be sent out to assist in making settlements and attacking Spanish treasure ships plying the route between Acapulco and Manila. Of course, the plan – initially presented by Arthur Dobbs, who had previously been disappointed with a company-sponsored voyage to the Northwest just a few years earlier – failed to accomplish its objective. After wintering at Churchill with the company’s cooperation, Middleton’s expedition spent part of 1742 probing the northwestern reaches of the bay, returning to London later that year with reports that if a passage did exist, it was not to be found through Hudson Bay.93 The voyage had several implications for both the company and the Atlantic world. Dobbs’s reaction to the unsuccessful expedition drew considerable attention to the geographical region of Hudson Bay. He initiated a pamphlet war between himself and Middleton by accusing the company and its former captain of conspiring against the success of the voyage in order to protect the company’s monopoly status. In 1744 Dobbs published An Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, wherein he called for an open trade in Hudson Bay and the need for an aggressive expansionary policy to address properly the Bourbon threat to British North America.94 To further his case, he included a letter describing a Pacific voyage by Spanish Admiral Bartolomé de Fonte in 1640, who supposedly sailed up the west coast of America from Lima and then northeast toward New England. Although little British interest in the letter existed when first published in 1708, Dobbs sparked a renewed curiosity in it and may have excited British fears about Spanish seaborne capability in northern waters. The letter undoubtedly contributed to Parliament’s announcement in 1745 of a reward for the discovery of a northwest passage and opened the way for Dobbs to prepare another expedition via Hudson Bay in 1746– 47.95 The subsequent failure of this second attempt provided the company with little relief: it continued to be condemned in Britain for its monopolistic privileges, and its operations in Hudson Bay were made more transparent to outsiders than ever before. Rumours about the de Fonte voyage and news of the Parliamentary prize, British expeditions to the Northwest, and the inquiry of 1749 may even have affected French geopolitical thinking in the 1740s and

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1750s and contributed to the elevation of diplomatic tensions that ultimately led to the Seven Years’ War. The intensification of British seaborne activity in Hudson Bay was believed by the French to be symptomatic of wider British imperial designs to secure a global seaborne empire that defied earlier international agreements respecting Spanish claims over the Pacific. In attempting to decipher Britain’s underlying ambitions, French statesmen also confronted a flurry of geographically dispersed activities and resultant disputes involving the British from Acadia and the Ohio Valley to Central America, the Caribbean, and India. Contests in these diverse regions, which remained unresolved after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, served to foment French fears and suspicions and to solicit an increasingly militant response.96 Even though none of the exploratory voyages realized their objectives, the company was aware that they attracted unwanted attention to Hudson Bay and their trade not only from rival merchants, but also from the French. In 1742, recognizing the potential for conflict, the company instructed its governors in the bay to be in a state of readiness for the appearance of enemy ships, “as the War still continues with Spain, and also in an Uncertainty in regard to France.”97 In the spring of 1744 the committee sensed the immediacy of war with France and the good possibility that the bay was a target. It sent three ships to Churchill and York Fort, including the Seahorse, which carried fifty men, heavy guns, and victuals for eighteen months. The captain’s instructions were to overwinter at Churchill, then sail for York Fort as soon as the ice broke up the following year, to take up buoys and beacons marking the approach and anchorage, and to be ready for enemy ships.98 The company, although successful in securing convoy services in years of war after 1744 as far as eighty leagues west of the Orkneys, recognized that the Admiralty’s priorities continued to lie closer to home and prepared its defence accordingly.99 The company kept its ships and posts on alert for the duration of the war and throughout the short ensuing interval of peace from 1748 to 1755. On the resumption of peace talks, the committee retrieved its ledger books carrying the sum yet to be reconciled by “The French Nation” for “damages in time of peace.”100 Right up to the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, the company continued to seek compensation for damages incurred between 1682 and 1688 and for the French failure to establish geographical limits in Hudson Bay as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht.101 Two months after the fall of Quebec in 1759, the committee approached Lord Halifax, the First Lord of the Board of Trade. It submitted a memorial stating the company’s unfulfilled claims as granted by the Treaty of Utrecht and requested gratification in any future peace negotiations.102 The ledger books containing the

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outstanding accounts were locked in the company’s iron chest, just as the traumatic events of that phase of the company’s history had remained fixed in corporate memory since 1713 and had shaped its strategy toward the trade thereafter. When Joseph Robson derided the company in his 1752 Account for its feeble attempts to check French encroachment on its inland territory, his comments ironically demonstrated the effectiveness of the company’s approach to mid-century. His stinging condemnation of the company’s actions in this period is often quoted: “The Company have for eighty years slept at the edge of a frozen sea; they have shewn no curiosity to penetrate farther themselves, and have exerted all their art and power to crush that spirit in others.”103 The company’s strategy, as evident from the inquiry of 1749, was to strengthen its transport and communication links with its scattered coastal posts and to remain vigilant in guarding against French attack from the sea. Robson could level his criticisms precisely because the company had managed since Utrecht to hold onto Hudson Bay and the seaborne approach to it despite growing uncertainty over Bourbon plans in North America and eventually real threats to the trade and the region in the 1730s and 1740s. By the early 1750s new ships were fitted with portholes in anticipation of hostilities, and once war began all ships carried heavier carriage guns and significantly larger crews than in peacetime.104 Wellarmed and well-manned ships following a routine sailing schedule and a defensively situated trading system of forts on the shores of Hudson Bay contributed to greater reliability of communications by the time conflict resumed between Britain and France. In a seventy-five-year span between 1689 and 1763, Britain was at war for forty-four years and anticipating war for at least another eight. The ongoing need to enhance communication between the committee in London and the company’s governors in the bay within this unstable climate required a maritime approach to the trade. Once the company was free from serious threat of French seaborne assault, it shifted focus. Between 1763 and 1774 the committee sent no fewer than forty-four expeditions inland. Journeys to the interior were not a new idea, for James Isham and Anthony Henday had made useful treks inland for the company in the 1740s and 1750s. These had been largely diplomatic missions, however, intended to strengthen existing relationships and forge new ones with interior Native nations. They also added considerably to the company’s geographical knowledge of the territory, necessary to formulating strategies both during and after the French threat.105 Once France was driven out of Canada, the company embarked on a purposeful policy of expansion that eventually led in 1774 to the establishment of Cumberland House as its first inland trading post.106 The bay-side

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posts had been firmly established thanks in large part to their being reliably and efficiently serviced by the “Nor-west Men.” Shipping by the Hudson’s Bay Company, as carried by the “Nor-west Men” of Hood’s picture, symbolized the stability and prosperity that the company had achieved in its trade to the Hudson Bay region over the eighteenth century. Faced with a possible North American resurgence of France and Spain in the decades following Utrecht, the company sought to secure its hold on the bay by strengthening its oceanic supply lines. Unwilling to assume that climate, geography, or even treaties were enough to protect its trade, the company took several precautions in the event of aggression against its posts or its shipping. The company’s maritime approach to the trade drew criticism from some in Britain who accused it of inactivity and indifference with respect to countering French expansion and to maximizing the resources of the region for the benefit of the nation. This was not a sleepy operation, although its effective control of information about the route and the trade portrayed this image to outsiders. The committee was well aware of its transportation advantage in the fur trade and attended to guarding jealously all related information, chiefly matters pertaining to this specialized navigation. The company fended off its accusers, retained its trading privileges, and ensured that Hudson Bay and the northernmost Atlantic trading route to the New World remained the preserve of British ships. The maritime strategy of the Hudson’s Bay Company fairly addressed the unpredictable climates both of the northern Atlantic route and of the geopolitical situation that prevailed to 1763. As an Atlantic perspective helps us to understand the motives of the northern fur trade, so broadening the geographic horizons of this perspective to incorporate Hudson Bay allows us to discern a wider spectrum of participants in the Atlantic world and to appreciate their imprints on it. Following the route of the “Nor-west Men,” we are reminded that the maritime Atlantic of the eighteenth century encompassed several Atlantics, each operating to a certain degree under unique conditions and restrictions yet all vulnerable to war and the uncertainty of war that existed for much of the period. The diversity of ships, trades, routes, schedules, and climates required a multiplicity of approaches borne out of an improved awareness of the challenges particular to each region. The ongoing tensions between European imperial powers in the Atlantic world also demanded innovative responses on behalf of those merchants and trading companies engaged in transatlantic commerce. Although the ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company represented British merchant activity on the northern extremity of the Atlantic basin, several features of its maritime strategy and of the

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northern route contributed to the development of British seaborne empire in the Atlantic and beyond. Consideration of the maritime strategy of the Hudson’s Bay Company uncovers elements of innovation and vibrancy that transcended this small corner of the Atlantic world, allowing both British statesmen and free-trading interests to gaze beyond the confines of the Atlantic basin.

notes 1 For their encouragement, insightful comments, and thoughtful suggestions, I would like to thank Nancy Rhoden, Daniel Baugh, Patricia Dove, Neil Kennedy, and Ian K. Steele. 2 Hudson’s Bay Company Archive/Provincial Archives of Manitoba (hereafter hbca/pam), A.1/143, folio 192. John Hood, a shipwright of Limehouse, produced a number of maritime drawings depicting naval vessels and notable naval engagements. The fleet of the Hudson’s Bay Company was the subject of at least two of his drawings. The one described here was housed in the company’s London headquarters of Beaver House until the late 1960s and reproduced in Oliver Warner, “Voyages to York Factory,” The Beaver, outfit 288 (Winter 1957): 18–23 at 20. A second version of the scene resides at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (pai6954). It depicts the same fleet in full sail from Gravesend. My thanks to Roy Easson of the Picture Gallery at the museum for his assistance. 3 Joseph Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence in Hudson’s Bay, from 1733 to 1736, and 1744 to 1747 (London, 1752), 6, 16; Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers (New York: Viking, 1985), 141–73. 4 Elizabeth Mancke, A Company of Businessmen: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Long-Distance Trade, 1670–1730 (Winnipeg: Rupert’s Land Research Centre, 1988); Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “Giants of an Earlier Capitalism: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History Review 62 (1988): 398–419; Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “Agency Problems in Early Chartered Companies: The Case of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” Journal of Economic History 50 (1990): 853–75; Michael O’Leary et al., “Distributed Work over the Centuries: Trust and Control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1826,” in Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler, eds, Distributed Work, 27–54 (Cambridge, ma: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002). 5 “Sea Horse teeth” were provided by the “Esquimaux,” or Inuit, of South Baffin Island trading in Hudson Strait; see hbca/pam, A.6/4, folio 72. Dutch artist Jan Luyken’s “Hunting the Walrus or Sea Horse, 1596” was the first known pictorial representation of the mammal; see Peter Knudtson, The Nature of Walruses (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1998), 18–19, 54. Walruses were thought to portend storms, and their mirages may well have been used to

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support the myth of mermaids; see Waldemar H. Lehn and Irmgard I. Schroeder, “The Hafstramb and Margygr of the King’s Mirror: An Analysis,” Polar Record 40, no. 2 (April 2004): 121–34 at 121; Richard Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, 231–52 (New York: Oxford, 1998), 243. For example, Hudson Bay is not even labelled on a map of the British Atlantic that appears in one of the more recent studies; see David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), xiii. The only study that examines the early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company within an Atlantic context remains Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford, 1986), 85–93, although Elizabeth Mancke includes Hudson Bay in her new model for understanding the early modern British Empire, which seeks to address this interpretive marginalization, in “Another British America: A Canadian Model for the Early Modern British Empire,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 1 (January 1997): 1–36. Nuala Zahedieh, “Overseas Expansion and Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, 398–422 (New York: Oxford, 1998), table 18.9 at 415. The King George was 220 tons, the Seahorse 180 tons, and the Prince Rupert 202 tons; see hbca/pam, A.1/41, folio 178; rg20/6a/10–11; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962), 79. The oceanic dimensions of European imperialism are discussed in Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space,” The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 225–36. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 66, 73. Ibid., 103–6; Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History, or Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1106–7. Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–5. For example, refer to Richard Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650– 1830 (London, uk: University College London, 1999); David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490–1690 (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2000); Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Seapower, 1750–1815 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2002). E.E. Rich, ed., Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671–1674 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1942), 131–2. For more on the events leading up to granting of the Company’s Royal Charter in 1670, see Grace Lee Nute, Caesars of the Wilderness (New York: D. Appleton,

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Century, 1943), 94–124; E.E. Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1870, vol. 1, 1670–1763 (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1958), 21–43. Jean Bourdon made an unsuccessful attempt to sail to Hudson Bay in 1656– 57. The other two French expeditions to the bay prior to 1670 were by Radisson and des Groseilliers in 1659–60 and by the Jesuit Gabriel Druillettes in 1661; see Cornelius Jaenen, ed., The French Regime in the Upper Country of Canada during the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1996), 78. Luca Codignola, “Laurens Van Heemskerk’s Pretended Expeditions to the Arctic, 1688–1672: A Note,” The International History Review 12, no. 3 (August 1990): 514–27. For more on the diplomatic phase following the period of peacetime conflict between 1682 and 1686, see Jaenen, ed., French Regime, 248–74. These expeditions were not made without incident. In 1674 the company’s overseas governor seized Father Charles Albanel near Charles Fort for infringing on the company’s trade and put him on the next ship for England; see Rich, ed., Minutes, 1671–1674, 211; E.E. Rich, ed., Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1679–1684, part 1, 1679–1682 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1945), xviii, xix, xlii. The Compagnie du Nord is also referred to as the Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson; see Jaenen, ed., French Regime, 197–200. C.O.134/1 (Hudson’s Bay Original Correspondence – Board of Trade, 1675– 1759), folios 16–18. Steele, English Atlantic, 90. Over its first decade of business, the company established posts at Albany (1674), Charles Fort (1668), Moose River (1671), New Severn (1673), and Port Nelson (1670). Most of these were either abandoned or severely curtailed in their trading activities once the French commenced hostilities; see E.E. Rich, ed., Copy-Book of Letters Outward, 1679–1694, part 1, 1679–1687 (Toronto: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1948), 345–69. Ships were also sent in 1668, 1670, 1672, and 1674; see hbca/pam, rg20/ 6c/8. On shipping delays due to the third Anglo-Dutch War, see Rich, ed., Minutes, 1671–1674, lxi; Rich, ed., Copy-Book, 231. hbca/pam, A.14/3, folio 66. A catalogue of Prince Rupert’s book collection listed the “Journall for Hudsons Bay Jo. Thompson 1676”; see Nute, Caesars of the Wilderness, 102. Rich, ed., Minutes, 1679–1682, xx. hbca/pam, C.4/1; rg20/6c/8. Further details of these conflicts can be learned from Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, vol. 1, 158–237; Walter Kenyon and J.R. Turnbull, The Battle for James Bay 1686 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971). Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, vol. 1, 238, 240, 242, 247–8. The events in Hudson Bay of the Nine Years’ War are well summarized in J.B. Tyrrell, ed., Documents Relating to the Early History of Hudson Bay (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1931), 19–30.

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31 The French captured company ships in 1685 (Perpetuana Merchant), 1686 (Craven, Hayes), 1689 (Churchill, Huband, Yonge, Northwest Fox), and 1697 (Royal Hudson’s Bay); see hbca/pam, rg20/6c/8. 32 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies, vol. 20 (20 January 1702). 33 No ships were sent in 1695, 1700, 1703, 1704, 1707, and 1709; see hbca/ pam, rg20/6c/8. 34 Nicholas Jeremie, Twenty Years of York Factory, 1694–1714, ed. R. Douglas and J.N. Wallace (Ottawa: Thorburn and Abbot, 1926); K.G. Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 1703–40 (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1965), lxiv-lxv. 35 This was the case in 1702 and 1705; see hbca/pam, A.1/27, folio 20; A.6/3, folios 59, 72–3. 36 John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of all the British Colonies, on the Continent and Islands of America (London, 1708), vol. 1, 390. 37 Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (New York: Abrams, 2002), 114–17; R.A. Skelton, Maps: A Historical Survey of Their Study and Collecting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 47–8; Canny, “Writing Atlantic History,” 1110–1. 38 Thomas James and Luke Foxe made separate voyages to Hudson Bay from England in 1631 and published narratives of their expeditions in the following years. Both accounts included maps showing the northeastern part of North America, particularly the route that each took to Hudson Bay and the region’s coastline. Although the accounts and the pictorial representations of their routes certainly aided those planning the initial expeditions to Hudson Bay in the late 1660s and early 1670s, these sources were less useful to the navigator, for they lacked specific latitudinal directions and measurements of depth; see John Barrow, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions (London: John Murray, 1818), 235–52; Thomas Rundall, Narratives of Voyages Towards the North-West … (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849), 152–224; and Miller Christy, ed., The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe of Hull, and Captain Thomas James of Bristol … (London: Hakluyt Society, 1894). 39 Richard I. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670–1870 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 25. 40 hbca/pam, A.1/3, folio 30; A.1/24, folios 6, 7, 10; G.2/1–2; Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 28. 41 C.O.134/2 (Hudson’s Bay Original Correspondence – Board of Trade, 1675– 1759), folios 103–5. 42 Articles 9 and 10 of the Treaty of Utrecht dealt directly with Hudson Bay and its environs; see Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies, vol. 3, 1698–1715 (1934; reprint, Gloucester, ma: Peter Smith, 1967), 196–7, 206.

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43 The estimated £100,543 13s 9d in losses suffered between 1682 and 1688 was calculated accordingly: seven ships with their cargoes and six forts and factories with their stores and trading goods, totalling £38,332 15s principal money; and £62,210 18s 9d interest, computed to the year 1713. See C.O.134/2 (Hudson’s Bay Original Correspondence – Board of Trade, 1675–1759), folios 121, 131–2, 137–48. 44 C.O.134/2 (Hudson’s Bay Original Correspondence – Board of Trade, 1675–1759), folios 137–8. 45 hbca/pam, A.6/4, folio 41. 46 Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 27–8, 495. 47 The French navy enjoyed its largest growth spurt from 1724 to 1731; see Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 191, 208. 48 Naval policy changed very little with respect to the American colonies between the failed expedition against Quebec in 1711 and the creation of a North American squadron in 1745; see N.A.M. Rodger, “Sea-Power and Empire, 1688–1793,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, vol. 2, 169–83; Julian Gwyn, “The Royal Navy in North America, 1712–1776,” in Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine, eds, The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, 129–47 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988); Julian Gwyn, An Admiral for America: Sir Peter Warren, Vice Admiral of the Red, 1703–1752 (Gainesville, fl: University Press of Florida, 2004). 49 The Bourbon strategy in America and associative British response during this period is best represented in J.R. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 4–7, 57–8, 76–7, 88. The most recent study of French overseas empire is Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 50 Paul Butel, The Atlantic (London: Routledge, 1999), 152. McNeill states that there was a six-fold increase in the volume of French colonial trade between 1713 and 1744; see McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 180. See also Banks, Chasing Empire, 32–7, on this rise of French commercial prosperity in the period. 51 See, for example, hbca/pam, A.6/4, folios 86, 108–9; A.6/5, folio 36; Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 88, 103–4, 114, 121–4, 135–6, 145–8. 52 hbca/pam, A.6/5, folio 70; Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 166–7. 53 hbca/pam, A.6/5, folios 74, 77, 80, 124. 54 hbca/pam, B.239/a/1, folios 22, 45; A.1/118, folio 27. The Hudson’s Bay also ran aground at York Fort the previous year, suffering enough damage that she was forced back to the fort for repairs; see hbca/pam, B.239/a/5, folios 33–4. 55 hbca/pam, A.1/33, folio 159; A.1/113, folio 30. 56 The 185 voyages refer to those made by company ships rather than to those of the post sloops that occasionally sailed with the fleet on outbound voyages.

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Sloops were intended to remain in the bay. The committee instructed the Seahorse to spend the winter of 1744–45 at Churchill out of concern that the French were preparing an expedition to Hudson Bay. The ship carried fifty men and eighteen months’ provisions, which were to be distributed between the two forts at York and Churchill to bolster their defences; see hbca/pam, A.6/7, folio 40. hbca/pam, A.1/121, folios 39, 45; John Barrow, ed., The Geography of Hudson’s Bay: Being the Remarks of Captain W. Coats, in many voyages to that locality, between the years 1727 and 1751 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1852), 12. Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, 59. hbca/pam, C.4/1; rg20/6c/8. Glyndwr Williams, “Spurrell, George,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, 1741–1770, 598–9 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1974). G.V. Scammell, “The Merchant Service Master in Early Modern England,” in Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450–1750, no. 4, 1–22 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2003). hbca/pam, C.4/1, folios 6–12. See, for example, the wages books for Captains George Spurrell, Joseph Spurrell, Christopher Middleton, and William Coats over the period 1726–64, in hbca/pam, C.2/1, folios 2, 8, 13, 19, 24, 29, 35, 41, 47, 53, 59–62, 70; C.2/2, folios 2, 8, 14, 20, 25, 32, 37, 49, 50, 59, 67–73, 87; C.2/3, folios 2, 8, 14, 20, 26, 32, 38, 44, 50, 60, 62–3, 65–79, 81–5; C.2/4, folios 2–14, 21–3, 25. For the industry average over the period, see Davis, Rise of the English, 138–9. Barrow, ed., Geography of Hudson’s Bay, 19–20, 122. T.L. Jones, “Marine Navigation,” in C.S. Beals, ed., Science, History and Hudson Bay, vol. 2, 797–824 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1968), 807. For instance, the company recorded payments for compasses and other navigational aids such as hourglasses to John Seller in 1668, 1672, 1674, and 1678; to Michael Marlow in 1690, 1694, 1700, 1706, 1709, and 1711; and to Simon Scatliff in 1715, 1721, and 1731; see hbca/pam, A.14/1, folio 100; A.14/3, folio 268; A.1/12, folio 26; A.1/17, folio 9; A.1/22, folio 14; A.1/28, folio 15; A.1/32, folio 4; A.1/109, folio 18; A.1/113, folio 30; A.1/110, folio 17; A.1/ 121, folio 229. hbca/pam, A.1/121, folio 218; C.1/1036, folio 26. J.B. Hewson, A History of the Practice of Navigation (Glasgow: Brown, Son and Ferguson, 1963), 79–83; Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker and Company, 1995), 90–1. See, for example, the 1763 log of the Seahorse, in hbca/pam, C.1/1033, folio 29. For more on the Elton quadrant, see Hewson, History of the Practice, 84–5. John Harrison, the recipient of the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for his development of the chronometer, was praised by company captains in ships’ logbooks within just a few short years of having his “method” undergo trials at the Royal Observatory in 1766–67. See Captain Jonathan Fowler’s comments on

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its usefulness in the logbook of the King George, in hbca/pam, C.1/373, folio 44. For more on Harrison and his valuable contributions to the practice of navigation, see Sobel, Longitude; Humphrey Quill, John Harrison: The Man Who Found Longitude (London: John Baker, 1966). E.E. Rich, ed., James Isham’s Observations on Hudsons Bay, 1743 and Notes and Observations on a Book Entitled A Voyage to Hudsons Bay in the Dobbs Galley, 1749 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1949), 328. Caleb Smith developed a quadrant in the 1730s that rivalled the Hadley device for a short period. The main difference between the two was that the Smith quadrant used a prism rather than double reflection; see E.G.R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England (London, uk: Cambridge University Press for the Institute of Navigation, 1966), 192. Rich, ed., James Isham’s Observations, 327; William Barr and Glyndwr Williams, eds, Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage, 1741–1747 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1994), vol. 1, 36; P. Serson et. al, “Ground and High-Level Aeromagnetic Observations,” in C.S. Beals, ed., Science, History and Hudson Bay, vol. 2, 642–87 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1968), 650. Christopher Middleton, A Vindication of the Conduct of Captain Christopher Middleton (London, 1743; reprint, S.R. Publishers, 1967), 193–206. Steele, English Atlantic, 274. hbca/pam, A.6/4, folios 3–4. hbca/pam, A.6/4, folios 5, 17, 20, 26, 40, 43, 48, 57, 92; Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, vol. 1, 514. Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, 31; Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 36–9. In 1719 Knight led a company-sponsored expedition of two ships to find a northwest passage via Hudson Bay. He and the rest of the crews perished at Marble Island in the north part of the bay; see Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 3–45; John Geiger and Owen Beattie, Dead Silence: The Greatest Mystery in Arctic Discovery (Toronto: Viking, 1993). The early history of Churchill is chronicled in James F. Kenney, ed., The Founding of Churchill, Being the Journal of Captain James Knight, Governor-in-Chief in Hudson Bay, from the 14th of July to the 13th of September, 1717 (Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1932). Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 68. The committee’s instructions to Richard Norton at Prince of Wales Fort, dated 20 May 1731, ordered him to build a new fort and factory on Eskimo Point near the entrance to Churchill River at the most proper and convenient place “so as to Command and defend the Mouth or Entrance into the River”; see hbca/pam, A.6/5, folio 51. hbca/pam, A.1/143, folios 65–6, 77, 79. Arthur S. Morton, A History of the Canadian West to 1870–71 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1939), 227; Rich, ed., Hudson’s Bay Company, vol. 1, 533.

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82 McNeill, Atlantic Empires, 82–4. 83 Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 46–71, 189–214, covers this close to twentyyear odyssey, culminating in the Parliamentary Inquiry of 1749. 84 Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, Appendix 2, 68–72. 85 hbca/pam, A.14/9, folios 104, 116, 118, 125; A.14/10, folios 5–8, 45, 51, 55–60, 67, 78, 87, 91–3, 98, 102; A.14/11, folios 1, 69, 97. 86 Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, 19. 87 hbca/pam, A.6/5, folios 88–9. 88 John Dunmore, ed., The Journal of Jean-François da Galaup de la Pérouse, 1785– 1788 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1994), vol. 1, liv-lvi; Glyndwr Williams, ed., Hudson’s Bay Miscellany, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1975), 75–94. 89 William Barr and Glyndwr Williams, eds, Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage, 1741–1747 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1995), vol. 2, 314–16. 90 Bruce P. Lenman, “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability, 1688–1793,” in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, vol. 2, 151–68. 91 Lawrence J. Burpee, ed., Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier De Varennes De La Vérendrye and His Sons (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1927); Denis Combet, ed., In Search of the Western Sea: Selected Journals of La Vérendrye (Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2001). 92 Daniel Baugh, “Sir Charles Wager, 1666–1743,” in Peter Le Fevre and Richard Harding, eds, Precursors of Nelson: British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century, 101– 26 (London: Chatham, 2000); Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 220; Glyndwr Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson’s Voyage Round the World and How He Seized the Spanish Treasure Galleon (New York: Viking, 2000). 93 The most complete record of Christopher Middleton’s 1741–42 voyage is found in Barr and Williams, eds, Voyages to Hudson Bay, vol. 1, 1–8, 69–74, 99–109. For how the expedition fitted into the Admiralty’s grander scheme for the Pacific, see Glyndwr Williams, “‘To Make Discoveries of Countries Hitherto Unknown’: The Admiralty and Pacific Exploration in the Eighteenth Century,” in Alan Frost and Jane Sampson, eds, Pacific Empires: Essays in Honour of Glyndwr Williams, 13–31 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999). 94 Barr and Williams, eds, Voyages to Hudson Bay, vol. 1, 239–48. 95 Barr and Williams, eds, Voyages to Hudson Bay, vol. 2, 1–15, 48–67, 353–6. 96 See Glyndwr Williams, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1962); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000); Paul Mapp, “French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay and the Origins of the Seven Years’ War,” Terrae Incognitae 33 (2001): 13–32; Dunmore, ed., Journal of Jean-François, xxxiii-xxxiv.

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97 hbca/pam, A.6/7, folios 10–11. 98 hbca/pam, A.1/36, folio 132; Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, 24. 99 On convoys, see hbca/pam, A.1/37, folios 163, 283; A.1/41, folios 90, 191. There were several occasions between the outbreak of war in 1739 and the cessation of the Seven Years’ War when serious fears of invasion were felt in Britain. In these times, naval squadrons watched the coast of France and patrolled the western approaches, and few resources were spared for other theatres; see Jeremy Black, “Naval Power and British Foreign Policy in the Age of Pitt the Elder,” in Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine, eds, The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), 91–107. 100 hbca/pam, A.14/10, folio 122. 101 hbca/pam, A.1/40, folios 43–4. 102 hbca/pam, A.1/41, folios 125–7, 139; C.O.134/3 (Hudson’s Bay Original Correspondence – Board of Trade, 1675–1759), folios 84–5. 103 Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence, 6. 104 For example, in 1761 the King George had a complement of fifty men and was equipped with two six-pounders, six four-pounders, and six swivel guns. At peace in 1765, the same ship carried thirty-two men and eight threepounders; see hbca/pam, A.1/40, folios 29–30; A.1/41, folio 223; A.1/42, folio 248. 105 Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 5, 29, 37. 106 Cumberland House was positioned at Pine Island Lake near the North Saskatchewan River, some 700 miles westward by canoe from York Fort, which became the primary entrepot for the company’s new inland trading network; see Richard Glover, “Introduction,” in E.E. Rich, ed., Cumberland and Hudson House Journals, 1775–82, 1st ser., 1775–79, xiii-xciii (London: Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1951), xiii-xxv.

9 The Atlantic of the Rival Navies, 1714–1783 da n i e l a . b au g h

The topic of this chapter is suggested by Ian K. Steele’s The English Atlantic, a book that provides a close study of Atlantic communications by sea from about 1675 to 1740. It shows how improvements in ship technology and navigational aids, along with greater familiarity with Atlantic winds and currents, had the effect of bringing the British colonies into closer contact with the mother country. Along the way, however, Steele frequently takes notice of wartime disruptions, most of which occurred because of capture or threat of capture at sea. The destruction or disruption of enemy shipping has long been an essential object of maritime warfare, and it has always been easier to capture – or in modern times, torpedo and sink – ships than to protect them. During eighteenth-century wars the seas were infested with privateers looking for sudden enrichment; some of these ships were large and strongly armed, carrying thirty to fifty cannon. Many merchant vessels also carried a few deck cannon for defence against small predators, and if the shipowner had acquired a letter of marque and the captain happened to encounter a weaker vessel, he might try to make a prize of it. Officers and crews of the Royal Navy were allowed the full proceeds of any lawful prize that they might capture, it being considered ruinous to naval morale and recruiting to deny the naval ships’ companies rewards similar to those enjoyed by privateers. In the French case the Admiral of France received 10 per cent, and in theory 20 per cent was owed to the king, but this allotment was often forgiven because for these purposes the navy’s ships were commonly leased by armateurs who covered the fitting-out and operational costs.1 It was expected that navies should protect national shipping, and this was a primary task of the British navy. British sea officers disliked

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the task, as escorting a convoy was a tedious and profitless assignment. French officers had an additional reason for disliking it since the assignment entailed serious danger: the British navy was generally superior in strength and had a code of honour (reinforced by public praise and professional favour) that called for focusing attacks on the escorting warships, despite the more immediate profitability of gathering prizes from the convoy. French commanders were permitted to take “convoy money” – that is, a fee paid to them by the merchant owners of the ships that they escorted – but in the British navy this was forbidden. In any case, the basic strategic and economic reality remained: it was easier and more profitable to try to capture merchant ships than to protect them, and when the task of protecting might lead to an encounter with the British navy, it was dangerous. An illustrative instance is found in the history of the fledgling Continental navy of the War of Independence. This navy was ostensibly created to protect American shipping, but the task was generally too hazardous, so instead its warships sought out and attacked British merchant shipping.2 In the years before 1715 the situation was less one-sided. Particularly during the 1702–13 war, English shipping losses were very heavy. French privateering leaders like René Duguay-Trouin and Claude, Comte de Forbin, operating in the Channel and its western approaches, sometimes attacked in squadrons using ships commonly leased from the French navy. In the Caribbean before 1710 (when Louis XIV’s money ran out), there were quite a few French men of war on station in the West Indies, and they were enabled to stay longer than they could in subsequent decades when they were less well supported.3 In the 1740s and 1750s French privateers were sporadically successful in European waters and quite often successful in the Caribbean, but generally speaking the imbalance in favour of British seapower in the wars of the mid-eighteenth century was very great, and especially in the Seven Years’ War, French shipping was disrupted very seriously. The British navy’s main task was to prevent a French invasion, but almost equally important and certainly more constant was the task of protecting trade. Participating in amphibious operations was a frequent requirement. The British navy was also expected to intercept, or to disrupt by threatening to intercept, enemy military expeditions, supply and relief convoys, and commerce. What deserves emphasis, however, is the constant day-to-day pressure of British seapower generated by the ubiquitous presence of British fleets and cruisers at sea in the waters of the Channel and off the French coast. The pressure on enemy shipping was amplified by British privateers, whose activities were somewhat protected and certainly rendered more profitable by the navy’s presence.

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The strategic challenge for the French in Atlantic maritime warfare was quite simply to avoid interception. Interception almost always occurred within two hundred miles of land. Once an eighteenth-century ship or fleet reached the vastness of the open Atlantic it was deemed beyond danger until it approached its destination. For outbound voyages, this meant getting safely to the westward of Cape Finisterre, Spain, or Cape Clear, Ireland. The same principle held true for inbound ships: cruising warships and privateers commonly awaited their prey near landfalls. Thus, when considering the Atlantic of the rival navies, attention must be focused on areas not far from the continental land masses (and the West Indian islands). From 1746 to 1763 a considerable portion of the British navy was assigned to cruising off the French coast, a tedious and exhausting activity that invited a good deal of loss from scurvy as well as storm damage. As the British hovered offshore, the French spent a lot of time in port waiting for a strongly favouring wind. British strategists realized of course that it would be much less tedious and punishing to sail into French harbours to destroy or capture enemy battle fleets and supply convoys as they lay at anchor. If this could have been done, the shape of eighteenth-century maritime warfare would obviously have been quite different. Similarly, if troops could have been readily landed so that they could burn dockyard facilities and ships undergoing refit, naval wars would have been foreshortened. With few exceptions, however, these things could not be done. The reasons had a good deal to do with French coastal geography. The first part of this chapter is devoted to what has just been mentioned: the problem of assaulting the enemy’s harbours and bases. The emphasis will be on British opportunities and capabilities, but since French strategists longed to invade Great Britain, the question of whether it would have been equally difficult for a strong French battle fleet and expeditionary force to approach and attack British bases will be raised. The second part focuses on cruising, particularly the ways that the Atlantic’s configuration affected Britain’s chances of intercepting and disrupting French naval operations and shipping. The conclusion offers an assessment of the advantages that geographic and oceanographic factors afforded each side. Perhaps our consideration of harbour penetration, bombardment, and amphibious operations should begin with a reminder of the immense firepower and inherent tactical efficiency of naval ordnance. In his book The Price of Admiralty, John Keegan has offered an interesting comparison: “Napoleon’s Army of the North of 1815, … destined to give battle at Waterloo, took 366 guns of six-pounder to twelve-pounder

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calibre into the field. The force of artillerymen needed to work … [them] numbered 9,000,” but many more were needed to haul them and their supply wagons, plus thousands of horses, and there was the need to bring fodder for them. “By contrast, Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet of twenty-seven ships mounted 2,232 guns, of which the lightest was 12 lb. in calibre and the heaviest 68 lb. The force of men needed to work … [them] was some 14,000.” He concludes that in sum it would have required over 50,000 gunners and 30,000 horses, as well as huge amounts of food and fodder, to transport on land the equivalent firepower of Nelson’s squadron; the logistic cost was five times that of the warships.4 Fleet firepower was of course designed to combat other ships, but when wind, tide and current, sailing space, and deep enough water permitted, men of war were able to bring their guns to bear on shore targets and to go inshore to support amphibious operations. Although the possibilities were limited and the difficulties formidable, especially on European coasts, the British often tried; this was an important element of eighteenth-century naval warfare.5 The British preferred to attack places that were used by the French for purposes of maritime warfare. Bombardment of cities in order to intimidate local rulers was not common. In 1742 a British commodore, under orders, positioned four bomb vessels off Naples (each carried eleven- or thirteen-inch mortars that could launch incendiary shells); he threatened to “lay the said city in ashes” unless the king agreed to stop assisting Spanish forces operating against Britain’s allies in Italy. The technical term for this is “active suasion.”6 In this case, the tactic worked, but there was a long-term diplomatic consequence because the young ruler of Naples, who would go on to inherit the Spanish throne as Carlos III, was incensed by being coerced in this terroristic manner.7 He probably would have been anti-British anyway, but this event is said to have made his hatred passionate, and upon becoming king of Spain in 1759 he was eager to join France in war against Britain as soon as feasible. The historical record of modern times generally shows that bombardment of civilian targets incurs a moral and diplomatic cost. In the American Revolutionary War, the issue of bombarding or raiding American port towns sharply divided the director of strategy, Lord George Germain, from Admiral Richard, Lord Howe, the naval commander in chief on the American coast. Howe’s reasons for objecting to Germain’s orders to conduct such raids pointed out that they tended to mobilize the seafaring inhabitants, many of them quiescent, against the British and also constituted a waste of military and naval resources.8 Despite the eighteenth century’s allegedly genteel approach to warfare, no one opposed bombarding or raiding places of military usefulness.

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The difficulty for British strategists lay in figuring out how to get at them. Mediterranean cities and naval bases tended to have accessible, deep-water entrances. For this reason, Port Mahon, for instance, required a strong fortress at the harbour entrance. St Philip’s Castle, originally built by the Spanish but greatly improved by the British during their occupation of Minorca, was, if properly garrisoned, invincible. Gibraltar was exposed to direct assault by sea, but against a land attack the British benefitted from the extremely poor roads from the hinterland: the Spanish could transport guns and supplies over them only with great difficulty. Moreover, the causeway connecting Gibraltar with the mainland could be commanded by warship guns firing from anchorages on both sides. A primary purpose of the British batteries mounted high on the Rock was to prevent enemy ships from occupying those anchorages. The approachability of harbours and naval bases on the French Atlantic and Channel coasts contrasted markedly with conditions in the Mediterranean. The problem confronted by British strategists on these shorelines was as much one of geography as of fortification, the only major exception being Dunkirk, which the French perpetually wished to fortify. The British pressed for a clause in every eighteenth-century peace treaty requiring that Dunkirk’s fortifications and harbour improvements be (once again) demolished. Dunkirk could not accommodate a battle squadron, but it was a superb base for French privateers. The French Channel ports had quite small roadsteads. It was therefore impossible for hostile ships of the line to stand in close enough to bombard the towns, although six bomb vessels were able to anchor close enough to Havre in the summer of 1759 to launch shells into the city and to destroy some flat-bottom boats that were built to transport invading troops. The French thereupon constructed a floating battery, which totally frustrated a follow-up attempt. In summer 1758 the British did manage to attack St Malo and Cherbourg but only by landing troops. In the case of St Malo, 8,000 troops were landed on a beach in Cancale Bay, from which they marched westward to St Malo. Unable to transport the siege guns (as planned) over the very poor roads, they could not compel the walled town to surrender, but they burnt the warehouses of the adjacent port of St Sevran and destroyed several privateers, small and large, in the harbour. At Cherbourg, by feigning a direct attack on the town the British managed to land troops on a beach four miles west of it. After the commander of the French defending troops panicked and retreated, the raiders demolished the small port’s facilities and burnt some small vessels in the harbour. In both of these raids, the troops were reembarked virtually without losses.

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This was not the case when a second attempt was made on St Malo, an ill-conceived operation in which everything went wrong. Although the troops were speedily landed at St Briac, the extremely strong tides of the River Rance prevented a crossing to St Servan (today these tides power a hydroelectric installation); then a westerly wind forced the transports and men of war to leave the anchorage. The naval commander of all these raids, Commodore Richard Howe, moved the fleet westward to St Cast, where there was a good beach for reembarkation, but the British general on shore was slow to realize his peril and did not march there aggressively enough. The French hurriedly gathered a countering army, and almost 1,000 British troops were killed or captured as they tried to defend the beach at St Cast and get to the boats while under French fire.9 Perhaps the greatest hazard of amphibious landings on the coast of France was the possibility that a strong wind from the west might prevent the men of war from safely remaining at the anchorage so that they could take the raiding army off in a hurry if need be. The beach at St Cast was not far away from the original landing place, and the losses there were really the fault of the general. In 1746, however, when troops were landed to attack Lorient, the anchorage was much exposed. If weather had forced the fleet to leave, the troops would have faced a long, difficult, and treacherous march to Quiberon Bay, the only alternative point of reembarkation.10 A direct fleet attack on a French Atlantic base was almost never possible, but Basque Roads was an exception. This roadstead was deep and commodious enough for large warships to enter, and in the mideighteenth century it did not possess adequate harbour fortifications. To be sure, nearby Rochefort dockyard was inaccessible. It lay a few miles inland up a winding, rather shallow river; not even French warships could enter this river without unloading everything – guns, stores, water cask, and provisions. Needless to say, ships could not be armed and stored for sea service unless they were in the roadstead, where they might be vulnerable to attack. Basque Roads was a place of great importance. It was the key marshalling point for expeditions and relief convoys preparing to cross the Atlantic. The British realized that they might be able to enter Basque Roads, anchor, and then land a body of troops who could destroy Rochefort dockyard after a short march overland. In autumn 1757 when the French had deployed practically all their ships across the Atlantic and thus left home waters defenceless, William Pitt decided to send 9,000 troops to assault and burn Rochefort dockyard. In many historical accounts this expedition has been considered an unwise enterprise: although its ostensible justification was to divert French military forces from the war in Germany, it departed too late to have much effect on

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Figure 9.1 Basque Roads and Rochefort

Source: Based on Ruddock F. Mackay, Admiral Hawke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 170. By permission of Oxford University Press.

that score, and in any case, Rochefort was too far away from the Rhine. These points are valid, yet in terms of the possible naval benefits the idea was excellent. Penetration proved to be easy. When the British fleet commanded by Sir Edward Hawke sailed in, the only guns that might do it harm were on the Isle d’Aix and were quickly silenced. Captain Richard Howe led the attack. He allowed only himself, the pilot, and a helmsman to be on the open deck during the approach, and while approaching received the fire of the island batteries without responding. When the seventy-four-gun Magnanine got within sixty yards, he

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unleashed a full broadside. The French gunners quickly abandoned their posts (coast defence garrisons in any army almost never included good soldiers). The way was now clear for landing the troops. The road from the landing beach at Chatelaillon to Rochefort was known to be quite good. The biggest operational problem was that even at flood tide it was a long row to the beach (over a mile) because shallow water prevented the transports from coming closer. This problem was foreseen and considered not at all insuperable during the planning conferences in London. Nevertheless, the generals now came up with every possible excuse to avoid landing the troops. They imagined masses of French defenders waiting behind the dunes on the landing beach, but no army officer went ashore to assess the situation or to gain information; the only reconnoitering was done (at night) by naval officers. Hawke, when pressed, had to admit that in the event of a storm or heavy swell from the west, it would not be easy to manage boats in case the troops had to be reembarked in a hurry.11 On the other hand, the situation for reembarkation was unusually safe because the warships and transports could remain steadily in their places without fear of injury from weather or enemy gunnery. The army officers speculated that the town of Rochefort was protected by a waterfilled ditch, impossible for the troops to deal with, but they made no attempt to discover whether this was really the case. Hawke tried his best to move them to action, but they refused to proceed.12 In reality, there was nothing to worry about. The weather remained favourable, the ditch was dry (although this was not known), and in any case, there were other ways that the dockyard might have been entered. The only force of trained French troops large enough to oppose the raid was very far away. When the alarm sounded in Paris, these troops had to be marched from Versailles to the Loire River, then embarked and floated down, all of which took ten days. As a result, the British missed a golden opportunity to destroy the works and the ships at the second-ranked French dockyard on the Atlantic. Instead of achieving a great naval coup, the expedition came home shamefully without a single soldier having got his boots wet. Needless to say, Pitt was furious. Whereas Admiral John Byng, who had failed to take any risks to help the garrison at Minorca, had been shot, the generals who commanded the British expeditionary force to Rochefort were, as Pitt remarked to the Duke of Newcastle, “about. They sit behind the King’s chair at the Opera.”13 A court-martial of naval officers had condemned Byng to death; a court-martial of army officers found the general in charge of the Rochefort expeditionary force not guilty. The expedition did have one beneficial consequence. Upon return, Hawke wrote to Admiral Lord Anson, the First Lord of the Admiralty,

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saying that Basque Roads was a “much finer” anchorage than what the British charts described. It was so large and spacious, he said, that “the whole fleet of England might lie upon occasion with great safety; and now that we are acquainted with it, it is in our power, with a superior force, to prevent the enemy from making up their fleets here, [and] … to prevent any squadron fitted at this port to join that of Brest.”14 Hawke returned to Basque Roads with a squadron of eight of the line in spring 1758 and knew exactly what he could do. On 4 April his squadron flew in on a northwest wind. Surprise was total. The French were loading and arming five ships of the line and two frigates, and there were forty merchantmen preparing to depart. Overboard went the warship guns. Anchors were cut away as the warships fled toward the safety of the river. The merchant ships dashed for shallow water and heeled over in the mud at low tide. Hawke had no landing force nor fireships and bomb vessels with him on this occasion, but his ships’ boats were able to cut away the buoys by which the French had marked the locations of their guns and anchors. He also landed a party, for the second time in six months, to spike the guns and raze the platforms on Isle d’Aix. Thus the British navy ruined the principal effort to send additional troops and supplies to Louisbourg in 1758 and prevented five ships of the line from sailing in time to augment the naval force there. In contrast to Rochefort the naval base at Brest, the principal arsenal, was invincible. Its commodious roadstead was accessible only by the Goulet, a narrow deep-water channel that could be easily guarded by batteries. The geography of the place allowed efficient, wellfocused, reliable defences to be established, and the roadstead was well out of range of hostile cannon fire and bombs. The English tried to assault the place in 1694 by landing troops at Camaret Bay near the entrance of the Goulet, but the French were forewarned and abundantly ready for them, with regular troops manning augmented batteries and trenches prepared by Vauban. Three hundred troops were lost in an attempted landing under heavy fire that should not have been allowed to proceed.15 Throughout the eighteenth century, Brest never ceased to be strongly defended, and the option of landing a small army on some more distant and ill-defended Breton beach with a view toward assaulting the dockyard from landward was not available because bad roads and rugged terrain were bound to inhibit the transport of siege equipment to the objective. These bad roads rendered Brest difficult to supply by land, however, so almost everything had to come in by sea, a disadvantage of great importance. The only naval base in England that was as approachable as Basque Roads by large ships was Spithead, off Portsmouth. The Thames River dockyards lacked depth of water; so did the Medway River to Chatham,

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Figure 9.2 Coast of Western Europe

Source: Based on Ruddock F. Mackay, Admiral Hawke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), opposite 1. By permission of Oxford University Press.

which was no longer as deep as it was in 1667 when the Dutch mounted a surprise attack and wreaked havoc. When Plymouth dockyard was founded in the early 1690s, it was deliberately placed in a western corner of Plymouth Sound; hostile warships, even if they entered the sound, could not range upon it. Plymouth yard could be threatened by landing an expeditionary army on the seaward side of the Mt Edgecumbe peninsula; guns and mortars could then be dragged to high ground from which the dockyard could be bombarded. This was a possibility that the British worried about in 1779 when a Franco-Spanish fleet had command of the Channel. Portsmouth harbour was protected by a narrow bar that prevented large British men of war from going in and out except at the moment of highest tide, but its roadstead was accessible; the British could rather easily arrange to block an enemy attack on Spithead via the Solent, but against an approach from the southeast there was no barrier. With a perfect (and rare) southeast wind, fireships could have menaced the anchorage, but if a battle fleet had tried to enter Spithead from the east side, it might have encountered dangerous hidden shoals about which the French did not have up-to-date information.16

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All in all, the greatest danger to the English dockyards – to the realm generally – was a military landing somewhere along the coast. The English coast was on the whole much more vulnerable than the French, partly because the English side of the Channel was less shallow and more approachable. Samuel Pepys, who was in the habit of jotting things down, wrote: “Mr. Evelyn tells me that Sir Walter Raleigh in one of his books takes notice of the difficulty of defending England by sea, by reason of the diversity and approachableness of its ports.” The same could be said of its beaches, and a few years later Pepys commented: “The meanest seaman or country parson upon the sea-coast of England wonders at the folly of our Bishops in the Public Prayer they have provided of late, 1692, during a sea war, for giving thanks for the security God Almighty has provided for us in making us an island.”17 His point was that without a dominant navy, England’s geography rendered the kingdom highly vulnerable to invasion, a point that had been recently demonstrated by William of Orange when he landed at Torbay in 1688. If, however, England was careful to maintain naval superiority, then in fact “God Almighty” had provided something beneficial: the same shallow water that tended to protect the relatively small French Channel ports meant that there was no safe roadstead large and deep enough to accommodate a battle squadron. This circumstance, along with the likelihood of westerly winds, meant that while a squadron from Brest could easily come into the Channel, it could not easily get back out.18 The inherent hazard was well demonstrated by the disaster that befell the French fleet at Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692. That disaster was provoked by an attack mounted by a strong British fleet. In the absence of such a fleet, geographical circumstances allowed the French to anchor near the English coast, where they could have landed troops without difficulty, and if the French had possessed the Scheldt estuary (which could easily accommodate large ships), the strategic hazard of bringing their fleet into the Channel would have been sharply reduced. Thus, when a French army conquered Flanders in the later 1740s, the British earnestly wanted it withdrawn and, to achieve this, gave back their conquest of Louisbourg at the peace of 1748. Louisbourg was the one base overseas on which the French government spent a good deal of money to improve and fortify during the long peace of 1715 to 1740. The fortified town could be taken only by a force landed on the adjacent coast, and it was taken, twice, in 1745 and 1758. When Louisbourg managed to survive a planned assault by the British in 1757, the reason was that the French had cleverly accumulated there a large naval force, eighteen of the line, which proved to be equivalent to the British when it arrived. When he heard the news that the expedition commanders had called off the attack, Lord

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Hardwicke did not at first realize that the strength of the French battle fleet was the real reason. In their dispatches they had mentioned this factor but had also mentioned the lateness of the season. Already in a mood to be angry with army officers because of their timidity at Rochefort, Hardwicke wrote: “But if their reasoning is right, it must have been impossible ever to attack it … Lord Loudoun says they must arrive there in April (Admiral Holbourne says in May) [because thick fog prevents going near shore from June onward, and he says] ‘they cannot ever remain on that coast after the latter end of September.’ According to these gentlemen’s account, what a country are we throwing away all this blood and treasure about? It is unapproachable either in summer, autumn or winter.”19 The next year, the British navy, by actions in European waters, prevented the French from assembling an equivalent naval force at Louisbourg and, by a well-conducted siege with a naval thrust at the end, managed to conquer it. The place was neither ill-fortified nor worthless. A large expedition was required to capture it in 1758, and although the base did not actually command the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence, no British naval force or expedition bound for Quebec dared to proceed without control of this enemy base on the flank of the line of communication to the Atlantic. Louisbourg also provided something that had been strategically valuable to the French again and again: a harbour of refuge. Most of the bases, ports, and harbours of the rival navies that were situated on the North American coast were, however, quite easy for a hostile naval force to penetrate. Admittedly, the best defence of Quebec was opponents’ lack of acquaintance with St Lawrence River navigation. Halifax, with its narrow harbour entrance, was easy to defend. Realizing the great value of this harbour, the British government saw to its establishment as a base in 1749. (Nova Scotia was the only British North American colony launched by parliamentary grants; it was supported for strategic reasons.) Great improvements were made to Halifax as a naval facility during the Seven Years’ War and afterward. It was Britain’s only royal yard on the North American continent. The entry to Boston was and is sinuous and complex (although the water is plenty deep), but most of British North America’s major ports, except for Philadelphia, were relatively easy to access. New York was perhaps the easiest, a point demonstrated by events of the American Revolutionary War as well as in 1664 and 1673. In the Caribbean, where deep water close to shore was commonplace, both sides depended on strong castles and batteries to defend their bases. The Spanish had shown the way. One remembers those Morro castles in Cuba at Havana and Santiago, and in Puerto Rico at San Juan – harbour entrance forts situated on lofty bluffs. The only

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Spanish harbour entrance that could be forced from seaward was Cartagena on the Main, and Admiral Vernon’s ships did this in 1741. All the forts surrounding Cartagena’s harbours came under British control, and the citadel should have been captured, but it was saved by delays and mosquitoes. There were plenty of mosquitoes at Louisbourg, too, but they did not carry yellow fever. Havana fell to a British amphibious attack in 1762 because its strong fortifications were incompetently defended by a Spanish commander who was not ready for the brilliant British surprise attack. Malaria and yellow fever did decimate the British army (which was supplemented by American provincial troops) but only after the conquest was made. Both French and British smaller islands in the West Indies were vulnerable to attack, and they changed hands often enough to validate the point. The British base at English Harbour, Antigua, was especially vulnerable. Its harbour defences were adequate against privateering raids, but only a superior fleet could save it from capture by an expedition. The harbour at Port Royal, Jamaica, had been very strongly fortified in the late seventeenth century but was less so after the earthquake of 1692. Nevertheless, the harbour and its approaches were quite well covered by forts and batteries throughout the eighteenth century.20 Although only a small permanent squadron was needed to thwart an enemy attempt to enter the bay of Kingston, the British constantly worried about an amphibious landing elsewhere on the island because they were reluctant to base a large fleet at Jamaica, it being so far to leeward. Neither of these British bases in the West Indies was ever captured by the French or Spanish. It may seem that this chapter gives too much emphasis to these coastal features of the Atlantic. It should be remembered, however, that offensive capabilities of a navy consist of two aspects, investment (such as blockade) and assault, and that the British navy’s opportunities to assault French fleets were scarce during the eighteenth century. Since sea battles were few, assault had to be achieved mostly by amphibious operations. We have seen how geography and coastal defences (when they were well manned) made it very difficult for the British, even in times when their command of the sea was not subject to challenge, to accomplish a landing on the coast of France that would produce a worthwhile strategic result. Yet on those occasions when a naval base was successfully raided or captured, the results were substantial. Figures tell the story. In the Seven Years’ War, British battle fleets, when fighting at sea, sank, burned, or captured a total of twelve French ships of the line (five in the fighting off Lagos and seven as a result of the Quiberon Bay battle). In comparison, when Louisbourg was taken in 1758, five of the line were captured or destroyed, and if Rochefort had been properly raided the year before, no less than

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fourteen (temporarily disarmed) ships of the line might have been destroyed, for a total of nineteen. If one adds the twelve Spanish ships of the line that were captured or destroyed when the British took Havana in 1762, the point is clear, and this takes no account of destruction of dockyard facilities and storehouses. One sees, then, how great an opportunity was lost by the ill-conduct of the army commanders at Rochefort in 1757. Yet one also sees that the most successful amphibious assaults took place across the Atlantic rather than in Europe, the French capture of Minorca being a rare exception. (There, in 1756, the small British squadron at Port Mahon escaped by leaving before the French arrived.) Because opportunities to inflict damage on the French navy by means of amphibious raids were rare, and because it was the practice of French warships and convoys to wait in harbour until wind and weather favoured their escape, the British navy in European waters was forced to adopt the tedious, costly strategy of persistent cruising offshore. From 1715 to 1744 the French and British were not at war, and consequently interceptions and disruptions at sea declined temporarily. French neutrality during the Anglo-Spanish War that began in 1739 was exceedingly biased toward helping Spain, but because Britain and France were not formally at war until 1744, neither side could attack the other’s shipping. From 1715 to 1730 the French and British were not even adversaries. This period saw the demise of piracy in the West Indies. The Royal Navy, which was kept strong in this peacetime period, did the work. It maintained ships on permanent station in the Caribbean and on the American seaboard, whereas the French navy seldom sent any warships across the Atlantic before the 1740s. In fact, French naval strength as a whole declined to a nadir in 1720, and the notion that there was a significant French naval renaissance under the Comte de Maurepas before 1740 is false. Under these circumstances the planters and merchants of the French West Indies received in effect what economists call a “free ride.” In the Caribbean as well as on routes to Canada French merchant ships voyaged safely under a kind of Pax Britannica – more safely than the British shipping, which had to reckon with Spanish guarda costas. With shipping secure, the wealth of the French West Indies grew prodigiously. The slave production of sugar and coffee, especially on Saint-Domingue (Haiti), gave rise to a vast increase not only in French transatlantic shipping but also in French shipping to northern Europe, which carried highly profitable reexports. There was no accompanying growth of naval protection; since there was no immediate need, the flag did not, as it were, follow the trade.

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Looking ahead to the end of the period 1714–83, one confronts the American Revolutionary War. The switch of the American colonies to the French side affected the conduct of maritime warfare not only on the North American coast but also in the Caribbean. Moreover, it removed some former constraints on the French navy’s transatlantic deployments chiefly because food produced in the former Thirteen Colonies was directly available for French naval purchase. The switch had the further effect of turning American privateers away from French and Spanish shipping and toward that of the British. In sum, the loss and hostility of its former colonies made an enormous difference to Britain’s capacity to wage transatlantic war with success. The Atlantic of the rival navies was thus considerably transformed. There is not space in this chapter to explore with care the impact of the changes, but it is worth noting that the capture and retention of the port of New York was absolutely essential to the British conduct of the war. This examination of interception and disruption of shipping focuses, therefore, on the wars of 1744–48 and 1756–63. Two aspects of the subject are considered: the first concerns voyages outward-bound from Europe (and inward-bound to America and the West Indies); the second deals with voyages in the opposite direction. Until nearly the end of the eighteenth century 75 per cent of British Atlantic trade moved through the English Channel, mostly to and from London. Practically everything that Britain shipped up or down the Channel required convoy escort. (Sir Julian Corbett, the wellknown naval historian, somehow missed this point and thus contributed to the serious lapse in the Admiralty’s thinking about protection of shipping when the U-boat crisis struck in 1916–17.) The French word for the Channel, La Manche, translates as “sleeve” and might as well be termed “gauntlet” since French privateering ports lay along the opposite shore the whole way. Once out of the Channel, British trade was by no means in the clear. The route to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the West Indies, and most North American ports always went southward across the entrance to the Bay of Biscay. Large or particularly important transatlantic convoys usually retained a strong naval escort until they passed Cape Finisterre. If there was a storm that wrecked rigging, the presence of friendly Lisbon – which Ian Steele has specified as part of “the English Atlantic” – as a place for refuge and repair was indispensable. (Gibraltar was not on the Atlantic track.) Most outbound British voyages across the Atlantic headed for the Portuguese island of Madeira to load up on wine, and the crews probably bought fresh fruit, but it would have been privately purchased, so there are no official records.

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This southerly route, employing the trade winds, was the path commonly taken by British merchant ships and military expeditions whether bound for the West Indies or North America. According to Christian Buchet, who has studied the question carefully, the French chose not to sail so far south as Madeira and thus reached the West Indies ten days to two weeks sooner; he has found that the shorter voyage brought the French to the islands in healthier condition. He also points out that the passage down the Channel and then south across the mouth of the bay added an average of ten days in comparison to the length of a French voyage that began at Basque Roads or Bordeaux. All things considered, the delays in passage down the Channel, plus time spent at Madeira, may have affected the duration of an English voyage more than the choice of a more southerly latitude. Especially for the British, it was vital that a military expedition to the West Indies should start early – that is, sail by January or early February at the latest to avoid campaigning in the rainy season of summer, when mosquitoes and malaria abounded, and to be able to withdraw, if possible, before the height of the hurricane season.21 Outbound voyages to Nova Scotia or the Gulf of St Lawrence sometimes followed a route directly northwest, which, with reasonable luck, could yield a short voyage in respect to both time and distance despite the prevailing westerly winds. French expeditions to Nova Scotia and the Gulf of St Lawrence, whether they sailed northwest or on a more southerly trace, often became horribly sickly. The expedition of JeanBaptiste-Louis-Frédéric de la Rochefoucauld de Roye, Duc d’Enville, according to James Pritchard, may have lost 8,000 of its 11,000 men.22 The large squadron of Dubois de la Motte that successfully defended Louisbourg in 1757 was also very sickly. Week by week on the return voyage, it lost hundreds to disease, and upon reaching Brest, the terrible germ was spread to the inhabitants of the port. Perhaps more than 10,000 seamen and townspeople died. Although Admiral Boscawen saw 2,000 of his seamen die of disease on his voyage to the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1755, British losses on voyages to the region afterward were much less lethal than those of the French. Almost certainly, there was typhus in the ships when they left Europe, and persistent cold weather inhibited recovery. A serious typhus epidemic had devastated a mobilizing British squadron during the extremely cold winter of 1739–40. The British, however, did not suffer as seriously as the French did in the Seven Years’ War. Perhaps the southerly route that large British expeditions chose (where they stopped briefly at Madeira) prevented its spread and aided recovery, but no one really knows why British crews and expeditionary forces suffered less than their French counterparts at this time.23

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From 1744 to 1747 French departures from Europe featured strongly escorted convoys. In 1747 the British learned that a large convoy was preparing to sail from Basque Roads. A strong squadron was manned and ready at Plymouth. Admiral Anson took command and sped southward to Cape Ortegal, where he found the convoy and engaged the warships, sinking and capturing most of them. That was in May. The following October, Hawke cunningly managed to put his cruising Western Squadron in the right place to intercept another large convoy. Again, the British focused their attack on the escorting French warships and captured six of the eight ships of the line. Although the merchant ships got away and sailed on to their transoceanic destinations, the French decided thereafter not to send out large, strongly escorted convoys.24 As a result, in the Seven Years’ War the French sent troops and supplies to Canada in fast ships (often warships with their heavy guns removed) sailing singly or in small squadrons. Many sailed early in the year when it was difficult for the British to assemble forces for interception. In general, the French strategy was simple: employ fast merchant ships, avoid large convoys, which took too long to assemble (and gave the British time to prepare), wait for a strong easterly gale, and plunge into the unknown hoping for the best. Chances were that the ships could reach open ocean before the British saw them. It worked: the Western Squadron made no significant interceptions of outward bound succours for Canada or the French West Indies in the Seven Years’ War. Its cruising was not entirely fruitless, however. The Western Squadron served to shield small cruisers as well as British privateers that operated closer inshore, made captures, and inhibited sailings. By the middle years of the Seven Years’ War, when French battle squadrons strong enough to match the Western Squadron either did not exist (manned and ready) or decided not to come out, numerous British cruisers and privateers could operate close to shore without fear of attack. These inshore cruisers interrupted not only trade but also “military” traffic; most notably, they limited the flow of timber, masts, and provisions to Brest. After the British captured Belle Ile in 1761, they grew vegetables there to help keep the navy’s cruisers on the south Breton coast free of scurvy. One result of all this was that the characteristic form of naval combat during the Seven Years’ War was the singleship engagement, usually between a French privateer and a British frigate. There were only two fleet battles in the Atlantic, and in neither case was the French squadron trying to cross the ocean. Could French ships be intercepted as they approached their transatlantic destinations? The British Cabinet, meeting with Lord Anson,

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evidently thought so in 1755. To avoid triggering a “European” conflict, the ministers decided to allow a large French squadron carrying 6,000 troops for Canada to pass into the Atlantic (it was seen as it departed from Brest during the night of 3 May). Its destination was known. All Admiral Boscawen had to do, it was supposed, was to reach the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence before the French squadron arrived, which he did. This occurred early in June; there was fog. A sudden lifting of the fog enabled two of the French ships to be taken (with one-sixth of the soldiers), but the French admiral, Dubois de la Motte, caught an early glimpse of the British squadron, held most of the ships back, and then sent them individually into the Gulf or to Louisbourg on an easterly gale. The interception largely failed.25 The British also knew the probable destination of any French squadrons and convoys headed for the Caribbean since, almost every time, the French tried to attain Martinique first. The prevailing wind and current from east to west are constant in this part of the ocean. It was possible, although not easy, for the British to position a squadron and outlying cruisers to windward of Martinique in order to intercept French vessels. The British navy, it will be remembered, enjoyed more reliable provisioning in the West Indies and should have been able to maintain such a squadron, but this was never accomplished. For one thing, in the mid-century wars the British navy did not assign enough stationed ships to carry out this strategy because politics gave priority to protecting local trade. In the Anglo-French War of 1778–83, when the British navy did station strong squadrons in the West Indies, there were three occasions when a British squadron might have nipped French operations in the bud by an interception. On each occasion, however, the British squadron failed to remain to windward or failed to guard both the northern and southern routes round Martinique to the base at Fort Royal (which was on the leeward side of the island), and in each case the fault lay mainly with the conduct and orders of the commander in chief, Admiral George Brydges Rodney. (Ultimately, Rodney salvaged his reputation by defeating Admiral de Grasse’s fleet at the Battle of the Saintes when it was en route from Martinique to Jamaica in 1782.) Turning to the homeward bound voyages, we first notice that it was impossible, for geographical reasons, to prevent a French fleet from leaving Cap Français on Haiti’s north coast. At the Gulf of St Lawrence and Louisbourg, the British failed each time they tried to intercept a French fleet upon departure. Dubois de la Motte escaped in 1755 via the Strait of Belle Isle, north about Newfoundland, a feat never attempted by French warships before yet expertly carried out without mishaps. In 1757 he got out of Louisbourg after a hurricane nearly destroyed the British squadron cruising off the harbour.

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It is beyond this chapter’s scope to examine the question of “blockading” the American coast in the American Revolutionary War, except to say that a commercial blockade – that is, against slow merchant vessels, which are what the Americans mostly had – was more feasible than has commonly been supposed. The British naval failure to cut off the Americans’ ability to earn by exports the money needed to buy foreign ordnance and gunpowder during the American Revolutionary War stemmed from the fact that the strategy of blockade was only fitfully attempted, the navy being co-opted most of the time to assist army operations. When those operations were terminated by parliamentary insistence in 1782, British cruisers took up blockading stations, and American merchants experienced severe distress, a phenomenon that was seen again in the War of 1812.26 The Admiralty often hoped that French naval squadrons returning from America could be captured as they approached Europe. The Western Squadron tried hard to do this – a mission that called for miserable autumn cruising – but it was never successful. Thick weather played a role, and of course a strong westerly gale at the right moment was very welcome to the French, but just as important was the French admiral’s opportunity to gain intelligence from passing merchant ships of the whereabouts of the Western Squadron so that he could evade it. The extensive French Atlantic coastline made large diversions practicable. Moreover, because the Western Squadron had to maintain enough concentrated strength to counter any probable enemy concentration, it could not afford to spread out, so the French squadrons had a good chance of evading. An outlying frigate or two might be deployed to extend the scope of surveillance, but the usefulness of this tactic was limited by the time required to get word of a sighting to the main body. And if the wind were right for getting a speedy report to the fleet, it was unlikely to be right for the chase. Although their inbound battle squadrons proved difficult to intercept, the French lost a lot of merchant shipping on return voyages, especially during the Seven Years’ War, a higher percentage than was lost by the British. Why this was so is not clear. As already noted, geography favoured the French: they had many Atlantic ports along an extensive coastline to which to return, whereas the bulk of British shipping was known to be headed for the Channel. It appears, however, that the geographical factor was offset by sheer numbers. In this sphere of maritime warfare, where happenstance and surprise dominated operations, the profusion of British privateers and Royal Navy cruisers appears to have been what mattered most. It may be added that the profitability of French privateering, which often employed very swift

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vessels, was diminished by recaptures, the prizes often being slow vessels subject to interception as they tried to reach a French port. Finally, it should not be forgotten that the Western Squadron was usually in a position to “welcome” and shield incoming British trade, this being one of its many useful functions.27 Taking a broad view of the subject, one may easily see that geography gave a huge advantage to the English over the Dutch. This was abundantly demonstrated in the fourth Anglo-Dutch War, fought in 1780, when the British government was so anxious to stop the illicit flow of Baltic naval stores to France that it blithely accepted another maritime opponent (as though France and Spain were not already more than enough). The diplomatic consequences may have been in some ways unfortunate, but the naval result was clear: British cruisers and privateers handily devastated Dutch trade in this war. Less commonly recognized, however, are the substantial maritime advantages that geography gave to France over Britain. As already mentioned, ports on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany were well located for basing privateers to intercept the prodigious British traffic that moved in the Channel, and Dunkirk threatened the routes to London. Brest was perfectly situated for purposes of Atlantic warfare and was exceedingly difficult, indeed dangerous, to blockade.28 Cruisers based on Brest could quickly get on station in the western approaches of the Channel. If the French had been serious about adopting a command-of-the-sea policy, they would certainly have tried harder to conquer Ireland, which would have enabled them to tighten their surveillance of the western approaches while denying ports of refuge to the British. For example, British East India Company ships, since they carried cargoes of very high value, often put into Cork to wait for naval escort to England. The French also possessed a natural advantage in the Mediterranean, accented by the great port of Marseilles and the Toulon naval base. The challenge for British naval power was to overcome these French geographical advantages. Whenever the British stationed a strong squadron at Gibraltar, the Toulon fleet’s ability to participate in Atlantic warfare was sharply diminished; twice during the Seven Years’ War, in 1758 and 1759, a Gibraltar squadron kept it contained. (The British navy’s task in European and Mediterranean waters was obviously more difficult when Spain was actively allied with France, but that is another subject.) Although French ports were seldom easy to invade, British cruisers in the second half of the eighteenth century tended to move close to shore. This was made possible by the continuing presence of a

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Western Squadron of such strength that the Brest fleet dared not challenge it. French coastal traffic was thereby restricted, and opportunities for surprise landings were enhanced. It is significant that in the late 1750s the British Admiralty began systematically to collect navigational information about the French coastline and harbours. Hitherto, amphibious expeditions had groped their way in dangerous ignorance (the knowledge of the pilots whom the navy hired was usually flawed or seriously incomplete). Shipwrecks or missed opportunities resulted. It was obvious by 1759, however, that precise knowledge of the French coast was worth accumulating. On 3 October, Hawke was told to order the commanders of all ships detached to cruise inshore “to make the best remark they can of the soundings, dangers, anchoring ground, and batteries within the limits of their cruise, with their bearings, the flowing of the tides, their setting and the heights they can rise, and to make draughts thereof when they have artists on board to draw them, which their Lordships would be glad to have sent to them from time to time, as opportunity offers.”29 Their Lordships were probably not aware when they gave this order that a meticulous and reliable survey of the St Lawrence River had just been begun that summer by the young master onboard hms Mercury, James Cook. Thus the year in which British maritime and amphibious successes reached a pinnacle also saw the beginning of a deliberate Admiralty effort to gather precise inshore navigational data for future use. France had two serious geographical disadvantages on the European side. One was the near impossibility in wartime of reaching the Baltic without British interruption. This was an issue of strategic importance because the best quality naval stores, especially masts, came from the Baltic. French diplomacy throughout the century was designed to encourage the Dutch as neutrals to carry these items to French dockyards. While desiring to stop this proceeding, the British also wished to avoid antagonizing the Dutch and thereby avoid open hostilities (as occurred in 1780). One method was to stop any Dutch ships heading southward toward the Channel, search them for naval stores, take those found to be carrying such stores into British ports, and see that the cargoes were sold in Britain.30 The other French disadvantage has already been mentioned: the hazard of sending a large battle squadron up the Channel under circumstances in which it could neither find suitable safe shelter nor retreat back down against the prevailing wind. The separation of Toulon from the Atlantic arsenals by the Strait of Gibraltar might be considered a third disadvantage, but with regard to transatlantic operations it was actually an advantage, as it was often not possible for the Royal Navy to keep a force at Gibraltar that was superior to the Toulon fleet.

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On the far side of the Atlantic, the British enjoyed most of the advantages. The French colonies in America were basically in the interior. Sea access was available by just two rivers, the St Lawrence and the Mississippi, one frozen for about five months a year, the other having egress in a remote and distant locale with an unhealthy climate. The Thirteen Colonies plainly occupied the best part of the Atlantic seaboard, and when the base at Halifax was added after 1749, Britain possessed overwhelming advantages. Moreover, the productivity of British American colonial agriculture and forest products yielded exports to the West Indies that were, aside from their commercial importance, of great strategic importance. By the Seven Years’ War the advantage that the British enjoyed by victualling their warships and troops in the Caribbean by means of shorter voyages from American ports was considerable.31 In France, prior to the Seven Years’ War, there were some far-sighted imperial strategists who understood the growing danger that British North America posed to the French West Indian plantations. Their fears were somewhat justified by the participation of American troops in the assaults on Cartagena in 1741 and Havana in 1762. The full consequences to the French empire of the proximity of British North America to the Caribbean can never be known because, after 1763, successive British governments threw away the advantages that this proximity offered by pursuing what was from a geopolitical standpoint an extremely ill-judged policy. First, imagining that the French could somehow recover their hold on the Canadian interior, they placed 7,500 British regular troops on the North American mainland. In fact, metropolitan France could do nothing militarily in the interior of North America except via the rivers, which the British easily controlled. For such a purpose, few troops were needed.32 Then in the 1760s a British government tried to collect specifically American taxes to cover the cost of these regular troops; as is well known, the colonists vehemently objected. Finally, when matters were pushed to an extreme in 1775, the British Cabinet and some (not all) of its military advisers seriously underestimated the task of suppressing the rebellion. They were apparently deceived by their low opinion of colonial troops, formed during the Seven Years’ War, and were encouraged by their confidence of being able to penetrate American harbours. Western European and Atlantic maritime geography offered England a unique opportunity, yet also presented a serious danger. The combination provoked momentous political responses. When France built a great battle fleet in a space of fifteen years (c. 1665–70), the largest in Europe, it constituted the most dire challenge conceivable. As Pepys remarked, England was easy to invade by sea, and without

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superior naval power England could not be defended. This suddenly risen French navy, when combined with the ominous tendency of Charles II and his brother James (who avowed his Catholicism) to view Louis XIV as an ally, stimulated the English political upheaval that led to an invitation to the Dutch stadtholder to come to England. When he became King William III, he wished to fight France on land, but this was exhausting, and the fact that Great Britain is an island induced the English people to reach an agreement with the Scottish Parliament and to trust (as the Dutch found that they could not) the defence of the realm to naval superiority. Only a small domestic army was required, but it had to be large enough to require that French preparations for an invasion of England be substantial and visible; otherwise, the fleet might be mobilized and gathered too late to be on guard. The Atlantic empire, established mainly for other reasons, played a key role. Its commercial development helped to generate the financial and maritime resources necessary for sustaining a strong navy.33 The French monarchy’s response to opportunities that developed across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century was tardy and inconsistent. At the beginning of the century, French transatlantic interests focused on two objects: the fisheries, which were the nurseries of seamen upon whom maritime power depended; and the flow of Spanish silver, which was often vital to Louis XIV’s war making. In these early decades, Atlantic commerce was not an important concern for the Court of Versailles, and the surging growth of French plantation production after 1720 and the enormous commercial wealth thereby generated seem to have taken the monarchy by surprise. Not until the 1740s did some influential Frenchmen begin to think that without the continuance of this source of wealth French power in Europe must in future decline, and thereafter the French government was intent on preserving its West Indian commerce. This mission required naval power, and the government made an effort to increase it, but the effort was intermittent and during the Seven Years’ War was significantly obstructed by the persistent cruising, offshore and inshore, of the Royal Navy. In the opening years of the American Revolutionary War, the French augmented their navy more rapidly than did the British and gained preponderance in terms of tonnage when Spain entered the war as an active ally in 1779, but the British navy’s difficulties in this war arose principally from the fact that its squadrons and cruisers were needed on both sides of the Atlantic. Clearly, from a naval and maritime viewpoint, France chose her moment to challenge British sea power wisely.

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notes 1 I am grateful to Professor James Pritchard for guidance on this point. 2 Richard Buel, Jr, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), ch. 4, esp. 84. 3 Christian Buchet, La lutte pour l’espace caraïbe et la façade atlantique de l’Amerique Centrale et du Sud (1692–1763) (Paris: Libr. de l’Inde, 1991), vol. 2, 962–1002. 4 John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty (Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin; New York: Viking, 1989), 47. 5 Shore bombardment was even more important in the nineteenth century, when technological advances enabled men of war to penetrate bays and rivers more readily. This was not just a question of “gunboats.” Towing powerful sailing battleships by steam-powered tenders to locations where their guns might bear and the ability to tow them clear in the advent of sudden adversity opened new vistas for naval strategists and new challenges for harbour-defence engineers. 6 Edward N. Luttwak, The Political Uses of Sea Power (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 17. 7 The operation is described in Admiral Sir Herbert W. Richmond, The Navy in the War of 1739–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), vol. 1, 212–15. It is interesting that in the 1930s Richmond was a tenacious opponent of what he called “the doctrine of frightfulness.” He argued with facts and reason against the idea that bombing civilian populations would, as enthusiasts for air power claimed, serve to shorten wars and reduce their costs; see, for instance, H.W. Richmond, Sea Power in the Modern World (London: G. Bell and Sons; New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), 135–6, 149–50. 8 See Daniel A. Baugh, “The Politics of British Naval Failure, 1775–1777,” The American Neptune 52, no. 4 (1992): 221–46 at 241–2. 9 Concerning these raids on the Channel coast, see W. Kent Hackmann, “English Military Expeditions to the Coast of France, 1757–1761” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1969), ch. 3; A.W.H. Pearsall, “Naval Aspects of the Landings on the French Coast, 1758,” in N.A.M. Rodger, ed., The Naval Miscellany, Navy Records Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), vol. 5, 207–43. 10 Fortunately, the fleet was able to stay; the troops happened to be reembarked two days before a gale arrived that would have left them no option but the march to Quiberon Bay; see Richard Harding, “The Expedition to Lorient, 1746,” The Age of Sail: The International Annual of the Historic Sailing Ship 1 (2002): 34–54 at esp. 44–8. 11 Ruddock Mackay, ed., The Hawke Papers, Navy Records Society (London: Scolar Press, Gower Publishing, 1990), 185.

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12 On the expedition to Rochefort, see Ruddock Mackay, Admiral Hawke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 160–80; and Mackay, ed., Hawke Papers, 149–88. See also W. Kent Hackman, “The British Raid on Rochefort,” Mariner’s Mirror 64 (1978): 263–75. 13 British Library, Additional Ms. 32,997, folio 297, 28 Nov. 1757. 14 Mackay, ed., Hawke Papers, 179, 30 Sept. 1757. 15 John Childs, The British Army of William III, 1698–1702 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 226–35. 16 Michael Duffy, “The Creation of Plymouth Dockyard and Its Impact on Naval Strategy,” in Guerres Maritimes, 1688–1713, 245–74 (Vincennes: Service Historique de la Marine, 1996), 245. Regarding Plymouth and Spithead, I am indebted to a private communication from Dr Michael Duffy. On Portsmouth harbour, see Philip MacDougall, “Hazardous Waters: Naval Dockyard Harbours during the Age of Fighting Sail,” Mariner’s Mirror 87, no. 1 (2001): 15–29 at 21. 17 J.R. Tanner, ed., Samuel Pepys’s Naval Minutes, Navy Records Society (London: Navy Records Society, 1926), 74, 303. 18 J.A. Williamson, The English Channel: A History (London: Collins; Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1959), 290–1. 19 Hardwicke to Newcastle, 5 Sept. 1757, in P.C. Yorke, Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1913), vol. 3, 171, original emphasis. 20 Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 37–41, 122–6, 136. 21 Christian Buchet, “The Royal Navy and the Caribbean, 1689–1763,” Mariner’s Mirror 80, no. 1 (1994): 30–44. 22 James Pritchard, Anatomy of a Naval Disaster: The 1746 French Naval Expedition to North America (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 4. 23 One factor may have been the pattern of mobilization: the French navy tended to recruit considerable portions of its crews annually, whereas the British surge in recruiting was concentrated in the first two years of a war. The gathering and crowding together of new, unseasoned men upon mobilization tended to propagate infectious diseases, particularly typhus, which was carried by lice. On the British typhus epidemic of 1740, see Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 179–87. On Boscawen’s losses in 1755, see Stephen F. Gradish, The Manning of the British Navy during the Seven Years’ War (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 32–3. 24 Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1963), 325, 359–75.

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25 The above three paragraphs are based on research that I have done for a history of the Anglo-French Seven Years’ War. 26 Baugh, “The Politics,” 236–40; David Syrett, The Royal Navy in American Waters, 1775–1783 (Aldershot, uk: Scolar Press, Gower Publishing, 1989), esp. 87. Buel, Jr, In Irons, 217–26, discloses the impact in 1782. 27 It is logical to suppose that the chore of cruising with the Western Squadron was not only dull, but also unprofitable, the big ships sailing with the main body seldom being in a position to capture a prize. Yet, while it is true that an independent cruise was likely to be more lucrative, the prospect of profit for ships assigned to the Western Squadron was not dismal. This was the case because prior prize agreements, generally signed by all the captains of the squadron, assured the division of any prizes taken by the ships passing to and from Plymouth for refreshment or repair (those ships often happened upon French trading vessels) and by all cruisers under the admiral’s command. 28 For a penetrating discussion of the difficulties and dangers in blockading Brest, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 2004), 279–81. I am grateful to Dr Rodger for enabling me to read portions of this book prior to its publication. 29 Mackay, ed., Hawke Papers, 307. 30 Alice Clare Carter, The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years’ War (London: Macmillan; Coral Gables, fl: University of Miami Press, 1971), 72–3, 88–121; H.S.K. Kent, War and Trade in Northern Seas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 130–9; Richard Pares, Colonial Blockade and Neutral Rights, 1739– 1763 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938; reprint, Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), 245–55. 31 Buchet, “Royal Navy,” 33. 32 See Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a Grand Marine Empire,’” in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 203–14. 33 Ibid., 200–2.

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pa r t f o u r

Amerindian and Military Frontiers

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10 “Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh” Reassessing Haudenosaunee Relations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1723–17551 j o n w . pa r m e n t e r

In a well-known June 1753 conference with New York governor George Clinton and his Council, Theyanoguin (also known as Hendrick), a Mohawk headman2 from the village of Canajoharie, shocked the politicians by announcing the withdrawal of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy3 from the Covenant Chain alliance, a vital intercultural treaty relationship in northeastern North America that dated from 1677. As justification for his action, Theyanoguin cited a lengthy list of grievances, which included the fraudulent activities of New York land speculators, an unchecked stream of rum peddlers entering Haudenosaunee villages, the poor condition of New York’s frontier defences, and the lack of an Anglo-American response to French incursions in the Ohio Valley. Theyanoguin capped his speech by singling out for criticism the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, a provincial body charged with “keeping bright” New York’s end of the Covenant Chain. He cast his vote of no confidence in their abilities in colorful terms, referring to them as “no People but Devils.”4 Yet in a less well-known conference fifteen months later, Theyanoguin was one of three Mohawk leaders who conferred with those very same “Devils” on the question of an August 1754 attack on the Hudson Valley town of Hoosick by Abenakis from the Laurentian village of Wolinak (Bécancour).5 After opening the meeting with the statement that “Brethren ought to speak to one Another, moderately, and in a friendly manner,” Theyanoguin

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obtained promises to this effect and then addressed the matter of Mohawk involvement in the recent events at Hoosick.6 After exculpating his community of blame, Theyanoguin pronounced the Albany Commissioners “good brethren” and closed the proceedings by “ordering” fellow Canajoharie headman Paulus to write the following Mohawk phrase into the commissioners’ official record book: “Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh,” which the commissioners translated as“We Have This Day Made Everything as Right as Can Be.”7 This seemingly prosaic occurrence – when considered in the context of Theyanoguin’s presence before a body that he and other members of his community had denounced publicly at least twice over the preceding fifteen months8 – raises significant questions about the complex and multifaceted nature of Haudenosaunee interactions with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs. What accounts for the apparent inconsistency in Theyanoguin’s behaviour? Why had the commissioners asked (or permitted) Paulus to write in their Minute Book? What can these records tell us about how power relations were negotiated between Haudenosaunee and settler societies during the eighteenth century? This chapter employs a comprehensive analysis of the original manuscript records of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs from 1723 to 1755 in order to reassess the history and historiography of the ways that the peoples of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy conducted their interactions with the Albany Commissioners during the three decades prior to the imperial takeover of Indian relations in colonial New York during the Seven Years’ War. The argument presented below challenges longstanding scholarly consensus depicting this period as one of inevitable decline for Haudenosaunee peoples.9 At first glance, the body of evidence considered in this essay might appear to offer little opportunity for such revisionism. “Seldom,” in the view of one student of colonial treaty relations between settlers and Native American societies, “does a conquering group of people know how to handle administratively, with any equanimity or prudence, the affairs of the vanquished. Preponderance and indifference usually prevail.”10 Furthermore, historians have long been skeptical of the biases inherent in the documentary record of early Native-settler diplomatic contact, noting the undeniable impact that “colonialism by treaty” had on Indian nations.11 Yet in this case the full implications of the archival record documenting Haudenosaunee engagement with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs have not been adequately explored. Peter Wraxall’s Abridgment of the Indian Affairs Contained in Four Folio Volumes, written in 1754, has served since its publication in 1915 as the principal documentary source for virtually all treatments of Haudenosaunee interactions with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs.12

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This is problematic since historians have not acknowledged the extent to which Wraxall’s so-called Abridgment actually represents a highly expurgated13 and severely biased14 secondary account of the original records on which it is based. The unpublished manuscript “Minutes of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs” represents a rich and largely untapped base of first-hand evidence generated by knowledgeable observers of Haudenosaunee society.15 Careful analysis of these documents permits a fresh look at the ways that the Haudenosaunee structured and perceived their relationship with the Albany Commissioners, their primary Anglo-American negotiating partners during the second quarter of the eighteenth century.16 Interactions with the Albany Commissioners represented a key component of Haudenosaunee foreign relations during the eighteenth century. Detailed evidence of numerous face-to-face conversations17 between Haudenosaunee representatives and the Albany Commissioners between 1723 and 1755 yields a story of a complex symbiotic relationship. Moreover, as this chapter contends, the nature and volume of the records of Native testimony in the manuscript “Minutes” of the Albany Commissioners indicate that their transcribed utterances cannot be written off as mere ventriloquism on the part of colonial authorities. These documents constituted a corporate memory of the Covenant Chain alliance for both parties to the agreement. The “Minutes” contained vital sources of precedent that Haudenosaunee negotiators used to substantiate arguments before the Commissioners,18 thereby supplementing their oral memory of agreements reached with colonial governments19 and reversing the generally assumed trend by which “archives of colonial knowledge” inevitably enabled conquest.20 This evidence, almost wholly excised from Wraxall’s Abridgment, indicates that the recognition and support for Haudenosaunee rights and status by the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs was not simply a function of the Dutch merchants’ desire to line their pockets with proceeds of the illegal fur trade. Instead, this recognition turned on the capacity of Haudenosaunee diplomats to exercise their agency as an independent political entity21 and to leverage their negotiating authority when the Albany Commissioners and succeeding officials of the British Indian Department attempted to alter historic terms of the Covenant Chain alliance in response to mounting imperial pressures during the three decades prior to the Seven Years’ War. The manuscript “Minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs” indicates that between 1723 and 1755 the Anglo-Haudenosaunee “contact zone” did not reproduce the commonly assumed colonial circumstances of “coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”22 Rather, Haudenosaunee-settler relations during this period

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are better understood in terms of entanglement, a situation in which power relations were multivalent, shifting, and unpredictable for historical actors on both sides of the intercultural encounter.23 During the three decades prior to the Seven Years’ War, Haudenosaunee negotiators, despite entanglement with the economic, political, legal, military, and territorial forces of settler colonialism, achieved substantial success in making “Everything as Right as Can Be” through their negotiations with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs. Who were the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs? The story of Haudenosaunee relations with the Albany Commissioners has been eclipsed by historians’ far greater interest in William Johnson, the individual who ultimately succeeded them as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Northern Department in 1755.24 Johnson, an Irish-born New York landlord, fur trader, and bitter economic rival of the Albany merchants, has been credited for achieving “more enlightened” dealings with the Haudenosaunee than his predecessors on the basis of his residency in Mohawk country, his proclivity for appearing in Native attire, his cultivation of close ties with Theyanoguin, and his affinity for Haudenosaunee women.25 Stacked up against the flamboyant Johnson, the predominantly Dutch Albany Commissioners appear inadequate or incompetent at best; more often they are reviled as corrupt and disloyal to British imperial interests.26 It is clear, however, that scholarly critics of the Albany Commissioners have based their arguments not on comprehensive examination of primary evidence but on contemporary opinions of the commissioners’ abilities held by outspoken political enemies (and key allies of Johnson), such as Cadwallader Colden,27 Archibald Kennedy,28 and especially Peter Wraxall, a New York militia captain turned polemical writer.29 Given the overwhelmingly negative historical image of the Albany Commissioners, some consideration of their origins, composition, and abilities is in order. Following the restoration of English control over New York in 1674, provincial governor Sir Edmund Andros relied on Robert Livingston, then secretary of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck, to keep records of diplomatic transactions with Indians in Albany. After 1698, in a revision of practice from the Dutch regime,30 Livingston maintained a separate record of the Albany Commissioners’ Indian affairs.31 The administration of Indian trade and diplomacy in Albany was further refined after Governor Thomas Dongan granted the city charter in 1686. The charter confirmed Albany’s monopoly of the fur trade and empowered local authorities to regulate it, which necessarily strengthened their control over Indian affairs as a whole.32 Seated in distant New York City, the English governors of colonial New York opted to

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leave day-to-day management of Indian affairs in the hands of local Dutch experts.33 Following a brief experiment with a board of four externally appointed commissioners between 1696 and 1698, control over Indian affairs reverted to the hands of Albany magistrates and handlaers (fur merchants). From 1698 to 1755 (with a seven-year hiatus between 1746 and 1753), the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs bore primary responsibility for New York’s Indian diplomacy, although they functioned subject to instructions, appointments, and special commissions from the sitting governor of New York.34 Between 1723 and 1755 the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs usually numbered between twelve and sixteen members.35 Commissioners were drawn from prominent Dutch patrician families of Albany, such as the Bleeckers, Cuylers, Hansens, Lansings, Schuylers, and Wendells.36 Many of the commissioners who served between 1723 and 1755, in addition to their extensive ties of blood and marriage, were fur traders, wholesale merchants, patenters of land, political officeholders, and active members of the Albany Dutch Reformed Church. Several commissioners had spent considerable time in Haudenosaunee country over the course of their lives and were noted for their facility with Iroquoian languages. Of the fifty-two identifiable individuals commissioned to manage New York’s Indian relations during this period, thirty-two (or 62%) served for six or more years (see table 10.1). Commissions were highly prized, even though only the secretary (who also served as city clerk of Albany) and the various interpreters, resident smiths, and agents received salaries. The rest of the appointed commissioners served without pay but had their expenses defrayed by annual appropriations from the provincial Assembly. The commissioners’ frequent contact with potential Indian customers usually provided more than adequate compensation for their labours. Combining the roles of businessmen and diplomats, the Albany Commissioners adhered to their belief that a mutually beneficial fur trade with the Haudenosaunee would maintain the Covenant Chain alliance and thereby secure New York’s northern frontier.37 The ambitions of the Albany Dutch (as manifested by the Commissioners of Indian Affairs) had long focused on regional commercial supremacy rather than on imperial rivalry.38 A conquered people in their own right after 1674, the Albany Dutch found themselves soon thereafter in the awkward and unfamiliar political position of protecting British imperial interests from French expansion. Lackadaisical AngloAmerican military efforts during King William’s War (1689–97), which left both the Albanians and the Haudenosaunee exposed to French aggression, only reinforced the commitment of the Albany Commissioners to seek alternative solutions to the problem of intercolonial

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Table 10.1 Individuals and entities serving as Albany commissioners of Indian affairs, c. 1723–1755

Named individuals Bancker, Evert (1665–1734)b

Total service (years)a 20

Dates of commissions 1696, 1706, 1710, 1720, 1724, 1726, 1728, 1729, 1732

Beeckman, John

3

1752, 1754

Bleecker, Hendrick

2

1752

Bleecker, Johannes, Jr (1668–1738)c

4

1720

Bleecker, Nicholas

14

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1742, 1745

Bleecker, Rutger (1675–1756)d

17

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1739, 1742, 1745

Bradt, Arent

3

1739

Clarke, Edward

1

1738

Collins, Edward (1704–1753)e

11

Collins, John (c. 1670–1728)f

8

1720, 1724, 1726

“Cornwell, Capt.”

2

1726

Cuyler, Abraham (c. 1663–1747)g

14

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1742, 1745

Cuyler, Cornelius (1697–1765)h

14

1734, 1739, 1742, 1745, 1752, 1754

Cuyler, John/Johannes (c. 1661–1740)i

22

1706, 1710, 1715, 1720, 1724, 1726, 1728, 1732

De Peyster, John/ Johannes (1694–1789)j

11

1734, 1739, 1742, 1745

Dick, William Gerritse, Ryer (c. 1675–1752)k

4 10

1734, 1739, 1742, 1745

1734 1728, 1729, 1732, 1742, 1745

Glen, Jacob

7

1734, 1739

Groenendyck, Peterl

2

1752

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Table 10.1 (Continued)

Named individuals

Total service (years)a

Dates of commissions

Groesbeck, Stephanus (1662–1744)m

17

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1739, 1742, 1745

Hansen, Hendrick (1665–1724)n

14

1710, 1712, 1715, 1720

Hansen, Johannes/Hans (1695–1756)o

2

1754

Holland, Edward (1702–1756)p

6

1734, 1738, 1739

Holland, Henry (1661–1736)q

16

Lansing, Johannes/ John Lansing, Johannes/ John, Jr (1687–c. 1742)r Lindesay, John (d. 1751)s Livingston, Philip (1686–1749)t

4 14 1 23

1706, 1720, 1724, 1728, 1729, 1732 1728, 1729 1734, 1739, 1742, 1745, 1752 1738 1720, 1724, 1726, 1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1738, 1742, 1745

“Norris, Capt.”

2

1726

Rensselaer, John

2

1754

Roseboom, Johannes (c. 1661–1745)u

8

1710, 1728, 1729, 1732

Rutherford, John

4

1742, 1745

Sanders, Barent (1678–1757)v

6

1728, 1729, 1732

Sanders, Robert (1705–1765)w

2

1752

Schuyler, Johannes/ John (1668–1747)x

16

Schuyler, Johannes/ John, Jr (1697–1746)y

8

1715, 1729, 1734, 1739 1734, 1739

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Table 10.1 (Continued)

Named individuals

Total service (years)a

Dates of commissions

Schuyler, Myndert (1672–1755)z

35

1706, 1710, 1712, 1715, 1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1739, 1742, 1745, 1752, 1754

Schuyler, Peter (1657–1724)aa

20

1691, 1696, 1706, 1715, 1720

Schuyler, Philip (1695–1745)bb

10

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734

Ten Broeck, Dirck (1686–1751)cc

16

1729, 1732, 1734, 1738, 1739, 1742, 1745

Ten Eyck, Hendrickdd

7

1739, 1742, 1745

Ten Eyck, Jacob C. (1705–93)ee

3

1752, 1754

Van Brugh, Peter (1666–1740)ff

28

Van Duyck, David

2

1706, 1710, 1712, 1715, 1720, 1724, 1726, 1728, 1729, 1732 1724

Van Rensselaer, Hendrick (1667–1740)gg

17

1706, 1724, 1726, 1729, 1732, 1734

Van Rensselaer, Jeremiah

13

1728, 1729, 1732, 1734, 1739

Van Rensselaer, Stephen

2

1745

Van Schaick, Sybrant G. (1708–c. 1774)hh

3

1752, 1754

Wendell, Evert

8

1724, 1728, 1729, 1732

Wendell, Hermanusii

6

1728, 1729, 1732

Wendell, John/Johannes

6

1720, 1724

Winne, Pieter (1690–1759)jj

4

1739, 1754

“Albany Commandant”

6

1738, 1739, 1752

Assembly member for Albany

3

1738, 1752

Unnamed individuals and entities

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Table 10.1 (Continued)

Named individuals

Total service (years)a

Dates of commissions

Assembly member for Livingston Manor

2

1752

Assembly member for Rensselaerwyck

3

1738, 1752

Assembly member for Schenectady

3

1738, 1752

New York councillors

5

1739, 1752

Sources: Edgar A. Werner, Civil List and Constitutional History of the Colony and State of New York (Albany, ny: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1891), 263; Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar of New York Colonial Commissions, 1680–1770 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1929), 21. Notes: a Calculated as the sum of all years encompassed by the commissions that each individual received unless otherwise documented. Individuals commissioned in 1720 are assumed to have been serving in 1723. Italicized dates indicate commissions prior to 1723. b Farmer, merchant, and member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1695–96, 1707–09. See Cuyler Reynolds, Albany Chronicles: A History of the City Arranged Chronologically, From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Albany, ny: J.B. Lyon, 1906), 134. c Fur trader and son of New Netherland pioneer Jan Janse Bleecker; captured by the Senecas in 1687 and subsequently worked as an interpreter; member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church and political officeholder; brother of Rutger and Nicholas Bleecker. See Colonial Albany Project (hereafter cap) biography 199, http:// www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/b/jjbleecker199.html d Married into the Schuyler family, a fur trader and member of the Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1726–29; brother of Nicholas and Johannes Bleecker. See cap biography 227, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/ bios/b/rjbleecker227.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 198. e Eldest son of John Collins; lawyer, surveyor, soldier. See cap biography [unnumbered], http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/ecollins.html f Attorney and lieutenant in Captain Henry Holland’s Albany-based garrison company; surveyor and trader married into the Schuyler family. See cap biography 76xx [sic], http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/jcollins.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 201. g Officer in Albany Dutch Reformed Church, fur trader, and local politician; married into the Bleecker family; brother of Johannes Cuyler. See cap biography 358, http:/ /www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/abcuyler358.html

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h Eldest son of Johannes Cuyler; a fur trader, married into the Schuyler family, and a pewholder in the Albany Dutch church; served as mayor of Albany, 1742–46. See cap biography 388, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/cocuyler388.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 228. i Fur trader, married into the Ten Broeck family, and a deacon of the Albany Dutch Reformed Church; represented Albany in the New York Assembly for five terms between 1705–27; served as mayor of Albany, 1725–26; brother of Abraham Cuyler. See cap biography 546, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/jocuyler546. html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 194. j Nephew of Evert Bancker, married into the Schuyler family, and a pewholder in the Albany Dutch church; a prominent merchant and militia officer; served as Mayor of Albany, 1729–31, 1732–33, 1741–42. See cap biography 7821, http://www.nysm. nysed.gov/albany/bios/d/jodp.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 202. k Fur trader, local politician, member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; married into the Lansing family. See cap biography 6011, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/ albany/bios/g/rygerr6011.html l Commissioned as a “Resident Agent” in Seneca Country, 1738. See Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar of New York Colonial Commissions, 1680–1770 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1929), 24. m Deacon of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; fur trader, interpreter, and local officeholder who accumulated extensive land holdings. See cap biography 3377, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/g/stgroesbeck3377.html n Merchant and trader; member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1698–99. See cap biography 4939, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/ bios/h/hehansen4939.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 144. o Fur trader known to deal with French; merchant, local officeholder, and mayor of Albany in 1731 and 1754. See cap biography 4954, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/ albany/bios/h/hanshansen4954.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 812; O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 43. p Son of Henry Holland, part-time soldier and Albany merchant; frequent baptism sponsor at Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1733–40. See cap biography 8487, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/h.edholland.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 218, 812; O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 24. q Officer of garrison company stationed at Albany after 1699; children were baptized in the Albany Dutch Reformed Church; stricken and incapacitated after 1732. See cap biography 8489, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/h/ hholland8489.html r Son of fur trader Jan Lansing; married into Schuyler family; local militiaman and officeholder. See cap biography 3739, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios//l/ jolansing3739.html s Commissioned as sheriff of Albany, 1732–38; later served as commandant and Indian Agent at Oswego. See O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 22–4; Joel Munsell, ed., The Annals of Albany, 10 vols (Albany, ny: J. Munsell: 1850–59), vol. 10, 86; Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols (Albany, ny: Weed and Parsons, 1853–87), vol. 6, 707n. t Fourth child of Robert Livingston; clerk of Albany from 1721 until his death, which connected him to public affairs and proved advantageous in business, real estate, and

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other economic opportunities; served on Provincial Council, 1725–49. See cap biography 86, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/l/phlivingston86.html u Fur trader known for extensive travels in Indian country; captured by the French near Michilimackinac in 1687; an elder in the Albany Dutch Reformed Church; also served as an alderman, lieutenant of the militia, and justice of the peace. See David A. Armour, “Roseboom, Johannes,” in Frances Halpenny et al., eds, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 14 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–2005) (hereafter dcb), vol. 3, 568–9. v Merchant, militiaman, and local officeholder; possessed extensive real estate holdings. See cap biography 1368, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/ bsanders1368.html w Son of Barent Sanders; served as mayor of Albany 1750–54; a merchant, “Canada trader,” and member of the Albany Dutch Reformed Church. See cap biography 1443, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/rosanders1443.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 242, 813; O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 31, 36, 39, 42. x Brother of Pieter Schuyler, fur trader, and captain of Albany militia; married into Wendell family; undertook a mission to Onondaga country in 1737. See cap biography 100, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/joschuyler100.html; George W. Schuyler, Colonial New York: Philip Schuyler and his Family, 2 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), vol. 2, 223–40; John H.G. Pell, “Schuyler, Johannes,” in dcb, vol. 3, 586–7. y Second son of Johannes Schuyler; businessman married into wealthy Van Cortlandt family; member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1740–41. See cap biography 1428, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/ joschuyler1428.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 222. z Fourth son of David Pieterse Schuyler; married into the Cuyler family; father-in-law to John De Peyster; trader, merchant, and contractor; mayor of Albany, 1719–20, 1723–25; served five terms in New York General Assembly, 1701–28; deacon, elder, and church master of the Albany Dutch Reformed Church; son Nicholas is identified in 1724 as trading illegally with Canadian merchants. See “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” New York State Library Bulletin 58 (March 1902): 1–580 at 296; Lawrence Leder, Robert Livingston, 1654–1728, and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 277n5; cap biography 101, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/mynschuyler101.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 190. aa Merchant, militia officer, and politician; member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as mayor of Albany, 1686–94; accompanied “Four Indian Kings” to England in 1710; noted for facility with Mohawk language. See cap biography 61, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/s/pischuyler61.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 110; Pell, “Schuyler, Peter,” in dcb, vol. 2, 602–4; Jessica Kross, “Schuyler, Peter,” in American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/01/ 01–00811.html bb Eldest son of Johannes Schuyler; killed during French and Indian attack on Saratoga. See Schuyler, Colonial New York, vol. 2, 114–19, 242. cc Born on estate within Livingston Manor and married into Cuyler family; deacon of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; served as recorder of Albany, 1728–42, and mayor of Albany, 1746–48. See cap biography 33, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/

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bios/t/dtbroeck33.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 232; Munsell, ed., Annals of Albany, vol. 5, 102. dd Listed as recorder of Albany in 1742 commission. ee Member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; married into Cuyler family; local officeholder who served as mayor of Albany, 1748–50. See cap biography 4881, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/t/jacte4881.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 238. ff Militiaman, merchant, and member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; local officeholder who served as mayor of Albany, 1699–1700, 1720–23; married into Cuyler family; father-in-law of Philip Livingston. See cap biography 5300, http:// www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/vb/pvbrugh.html; Reynolds, Albany Chronicles, 148. gg Merchant, assemblyman, and elder of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; younger brother of Kiliaen, Lord of Rensselaerswyck. See cap biography 5053, http:// www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/vr/hvr5053.html hh Son of prominent Albany “Canada” trader Gosen Van Schaick; merchant and member of Albany Dutch Reformed Church; married into the Roseboom family; served as recorder of Albany, 1750–55, and mayor of Albany, 1756–61. See cap biography 3987, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/vs/sgvschaick.html; O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 31. ii His son Jacob is identified in 1724 as trading illegally with Canadian merchants. See “Calendar of Council Minutes,” 296. jj Hudson River carrier, local officeholder, assemblyman. See cap biography 3032, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/w/piwinne3032.html; Gregory D. Huber, “Making Progress Every Day: The 1720s Pieter Winne House,” de Halve Maen 77 (2004): 7–14.

conflict.39 Working with Haudenosaunee people, the commissioners forged new economic and diplomatic options for themselves during the final quarter of the seventeenth century. An “illegal” fur trade between Canada and Albany existed as early as 1672.40 Following longstanding Aboriginal practices41 and asserting their exclusive right to travel and trade freely across intercolonial boundaries,42 residents of the Laurentian Haudenosaunee43 villages of Kahnawake (and, after 1717, Kanesatake) carried pelts procured in Canada over 270 miles by water to Albany, where they exchanged them for English and Dutch manufactured goods. By 1700 this “frontier exchange economy”44 had created, through Haudenosauneemediated negotiations between Albany traders and French Canadian officials, a de facto neutrality agreement between New York and New France. To protect these commercial arrangements, both British and French colonial authorities pledged mutual nonaggression and encouraged their Native American allies to direct their military energies away from the Lake Champlain-Hudson River corridor.45 The “illegal” fur trade constituted the economic, social, and political basis of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s relationship with the

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Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs during the eighteenth century. This activity did not escape the attention of imperially minded critics in New York and New England, who deeply resented the lucrative business that Albany merchants conducted with New France, perceiving it as a sacrifice of patriotic principles to profit margins. Bitter complaints of the so-called “Albany Spirit” – the ostensibly self-serving, money-grubbing, and indifferent attitude of the Albany Commissioners – circulated through multiple levels of public and private correspondence in the northern Anglo-American colonies.46 Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson castigated the manner in which the Albany Commissioners “took care of themselves” with their neutrality policy while turning a blind eye to devastating French-allied Indian raids on the New England frontier.47 Cadwallader Colden echoed this sentiment, claiming that the Albany Commissioners possessed “no other view of life, than that of getting money.”48 Swedish botanist Peter Kalm came under the influence of anti-Albanians while visiting New York in 1749 and had similarly harsh words for their Indian policy.49 Thomas Pownall opined in 1753 that during the tenure of the Albany Commissioners, “the frauds, abuses, and deceits that these people [the Haudenosaunee] have been treated with and suffered under have had no bounds.”50 Lord Adam Gordon, during a brief visit in 1765, noted among the people of Albany “an unwearied attention to their own personal and particular Interests, and an abhorrence to all superiour powers.”51 William Johnson, reviewing in 1767 the state of Indian affairs in the northern Anglo-American colonies prior to his tenure, scoffed at the “ignorance” and “parsimony” of his “Low Dutch” fur trading rivals in Albany, deploring their supposed laxity and incompetence.52 Wraxall, Johnson’s foremost propagandist, proved the most venomous critic of the neutrality policy ostensibly concocted by the Albany Commissioners. He slandered them throughout his Abridgment with every insult he could muster, ranging from “fat headed” and “filled with Belgick Phlegm” to “vermin,” “Christian Jews,” and “Dutch Reptiles.”53 Although previous historians have defended the Albany Commissioners’ neutrality policy on the grounds that they were acting out of legitimate self-interest and concern for their own security,54 no one to date has considered the extent to which the parameters of the Albany Commissioners’ course of political action were set by Haudenosaunee objectives and practices. Following a period of intense warfare during the concluding decades of the seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee recognized that neutrality represented their best hope for survival as an independent power in the colonial Northeast. In 1701 they successfully negotiated separate peace treaties with the English and French.55 While clear

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anglophile and francophile factions continued to exist among the Haudenosaunee after 1701, the Confederacy leadership sought to retain consensus on the idea of balanced diplomatic neutrality between the two competing European empires. By conducting parallel negotiations and maintaining alliances with both the French and the English, the neutral Haudenosaunee Confederacy preserved a remarkable degree of cohesion, power, and influence over the next six decades. The Haudenosaunee employed their professed consensus on neutrality as bargaining leverage in their dealings with outside groups, and their leaders also used this consensus as a legitimizing ideology to foster a sense of unity among the constituent nations of the confederacy. As neutrals, the Haudenosaunee retained the power in diplomatic negotiations to refuse or to reject proposals that ran counter to their selfperceived interests, to buy time to consult fully among themselves, to stall, to equivocate, to defer answers to the queries and/or demands of European colonial negotiators, or even to give no answer at all.56 In order to preserve their power and status as neutrals during the first half of the eighteenth century, the Haudenosaunee maintained active and viable relationships with both their Anglo-American and French Canadian clients.57 Through their frequent communication with both sides, the Haudenosaunee gathered, processed, and acted on a great deal of intelligence. Their unparalleled access to detailed knowledge of both French and English colonial affairs enabled them to calibrate and negotiate their own foreign policy from a better-informed standpoint than either of their European rivals prior to the 1760 conquest of Canada. Recognition and encouragement of Haudenosaunee neutrality by the Albany Commissioners at once strengthened the vitality of this policy among the Haudenosaunee and made it more difficult for either anglophile or francophile extremists within the nations of the confederacy to upset the balance. Trade and diplomacy in Albany offered numerous opportunities for communications between confederacy representatives and Laurentian Haudenosaunee spokespersons. On three occasions (in 1735, 1742, and 1754),58 Laurentian and Confederacy leaders concluded formal intercolonial neutrality treaties under the auspices of the Albany Commissioners’ meetings. Additionally, and much more commonly, less formal, “everyday” conversations59 took place between Haudenosaunee representatives and the Albany Commissioners, which nevertheless maintained the viability of this relationship in Haudenosaunee eyes.60 Beyond the crucial support for neutrality provided by the Albany Commissioners, the Haudenosaunee also benefited from other aspects of their Covenant Chain relationship with New York.61 Although accused by Wraxall of cheating Haudenosaunee traders,62 the Albany

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Commissioners regularly heard complaints of abuses in the fur trade and attempted to resolve these conflicts.63 The Albany Commissioners also attempted (albeit with little success) to curb the flow of alcohol into Haudenosaunee villages,64 and they devoted a substantial portion of their budget between 1724 and 1744 to funding resident smiths in several Haudenosaunee territories (most frequently among the Senecas, who lived the greatest distance from any means of supply or repair for their firearms).65 In addition to these “common-sense” approaches designed to maintain the Haudenosaunee as allies, the Albany Commissioners also exhibited a strong aptitude for the sort of attentive and nuanced diplomacy that adhered to established Haudenosaunee custom.66 They performed the condolence ceremonies essential for respectful and constructive interaction with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,67 offering presents to “wipe away the tears” of Haudenosaunee mourners and recognizing new Haudenosaunee leaders offered up by their kinfolk to replace those who had passed away.68 The abundant evidence of this practice in the original records contradicts William Johnson’s 1749 contention that the condolence ceremony “was always neglected in the late Commissioners time, which gave the French an opportunity to do it.”69 Additionally, the Albany Commissioners served in a critical advisory capacity at thirteen governors’ conferences held at Albany between 1723 and 1755, ensuring that traditional rituals of the Covenant Chain alliance were followed and providing vital assistance with the composition, translation, and interpretation of speeches. They also adhered to the indigenous custom of preliminary (or ancillary) private conferences “in the bushes” between Haudenosaunee negotiators and various colonial officials to ensure clear understanding across the linguistic divide, and they took care to issue individual presents to Haudenosaunee leaders.70 Although the Albany Commissioners manifested a high degree of cultural sensitivity in their exchanges with Haudenosaunee people, they did not always act in the best interests of the confederacy. Careful analysis of the commissioners’ records reveals the substantial degree to which the Albany Commissioners, their support for Haudenosaunee neutrality notwithstanding, complied with Anglo-American imperial objectives that ran counter to confederacy interests. The Albany Commissioners cooperated with longstanding efforts to bring an end to what officials in several colonies perceived as a dangerous and wasteful conflict between the Haudenosaunee and the Catawbas of South Carolina (insofar as both nations were nominally allied to England), ignoring the ways that these long-distance campaigns served the political and cultural goals of the confederacy nations.71 The commissioners

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also endeavoured to prevent Haudenosaunee leaders from conducting independent negotiations with Canadian authorities, preferring to maintain close oversight of the neutrality agreement with New France by hosting Laurentian Haudenosaunee delegates in Albany72 and through direct communication with Canadian governors (including personal visits to Canada on passports issued by New York governors).73 Yet whenever they perceived the terms of their negotiated neutrality agreement to be in jeopardy, the commissioners did not hesitate to relay intelligence of pending frontier raids by Laurentian Haudenosaunee warriors to officials in the New England colonies.74 While the Albany Commissioners’ actions reflected the inherent tension in their concurrent efforts to preserve good relations with the Haudenosaunee while also serving the interests of colonial AngloAmerican society, the extensive record of their transactions with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy may also be read for evidence of Haudenosaunee agency in negotiating their own goals and asserting their status within the Covenant Chain alliance. Between 1723 and 1755 Haudenosaunee negotiations with the Albany Commissioners centred on four principal issues: freedom of trade, legal jurisdiction, efforts to retain control over land transactions, and maintenance of Haudenosaunee diplomatic neutrality in imperial wars. Assessing the degree to which Haudenosaunee leaders achieved these objectives helps to illuminate the exercise of indigenous power under circumstances of colonial entanglement and complicates the historiographical master narrative of eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee decline. The year 1723, the first for which detailed original records of the activities of the Albany Commissioners exist, marked the beginning of a transition in Anglo-Haudenosaunee Covenant Chain diplomacy. New York governor William Burnet, reviving an effort initiated by his predecessor Robert Hunter,75 commenced in 1720 a five-year crusade to legislate an end to the “illegal fur trade” between Albany and Montreal.76 For British officials, interdiction of this traffic represented a primary means of asserting imperial hegemony over the Haudenosaunee insofar as it promised to restrict their direct contact with New France as well as to limit French access to cheaper, higher-quality English woolen “stroud” blankets and wampum intended for their allied Native customers in the Great Lakes region.77 Opponents of the “illegal fur trade” also stressed the confederacy’s supposed hatred of the illicit Albany-Canada commerce in their polemical writings, arguing that the north-south flow of furs and goods robbed them of their profitable “middleman” position between fur-producing Indian nations of the West and supplies of trade goods in Anglo-American colonial markets.78 In 1723 New York’s Legislature went so far as to order the

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Albany Commissioners to oversee the construction of “two Houses each of the Length of Seventy Foot and bredth of fifteen Feet.” These structures were intended to “Lodge and Accommodate the Indians coming to Albany to trade” and also to enhance surveillance of the trading process, which frequently occurred outside city limits.79 For both the Albany Commissioners and the confederacy, these restrictions on Haudenosaunee-mediated exchange across colonial boundaries constituted an unprecedented attack on the linchpin of their diplomatic and economic relationship. Albany’s commercial elites stood to lose their most important source of peltry as well as their most profitable market for imported trade goods. An effective ban on trading with Canada also threatened the vitality of the confederacy’s neutrality policy, as it portended reduced opportunities for contact and intelligence exchange with Laurentian kinfolk.80 The response of the Haudenosaunee and the Albany Commissioners to this crisis established the context in which these two entities confronted intensifying imperialist attitudes within New York’s colonial administration for the next thirty years. Despite contemporary claims that they lacked proper regard for the “Interest of the Country,”81 the Albany Commissioners actually complied with Burnet’s legislation. Between 1723 and 1725 they administered oaths requiring fellow traders not to offer goods designated for the “Indian trade” in exchange for Canadian furs, they issued warrants for inspecting the cargoes of suspected smugglers, and they even confiscated the entire cargo of one scofflaw.82 Members of the families of two long-serving Albany Commissioners were charged in 1724 with trading illegally with Canadian merchants.83 Additionally, while enforcing Burnet’s policies, the Albany Commissioners encouraged and facilitated economic and political ties between the Haudenosaunee and Native peoples from the western Great Lakes region who paddled their canoes through Haudenosaunee territory to trade at Albany.84 The commissioners realized, however, that Burnet’s opposition to the illegal fur trade, which supplied the economic underpinnings of the neutrality agreement between Canada and New York, ignored the trade’s role in the overall calculus of Haudenosaunee foreign relations. For the Haudenosaunee, the benefits of preserving peace and neutrality and of maintaining their own diplomatic ties to Canada through regular contact with their Laurentian kinfolk outweighed any negative economic effects from the loss of “middleman” status that the illegal fur trade allegedly caused. In the view of the Albany Commissioners, maintaining Haudenosaunee neutrality by promoting peaceful correspondence between those living in New York and those living in Canada served frontier security interests.85 While cooperating with

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Burnet’s policy on the ground, the commissioners actively lobbied their mercantile and political contacts in London. By 1726 the legislative ban on the “illegal” trade had been replaced with a system of duties applied to Indian goods intended for “the northward.”86 In 1729 the intervention of newly appointed New York governor John Montgomerie convinced King George II to veto all of New York’s provincial legislation pertaining to the fur trade on the grounds that it hindered the flow of commerce between England and New York.87 The Albany Commissioners enforced Burnet’s legislation for only a short time and exclusively among the settler population. No Haudenosaunee individuals were penalized for continued involvement in the Canadian trade, and the commissioners never ceased to employ their meetings as a forum for communications between confederacy representatives and Laurentian Haudenosaunee spokespersons. By continuing their economic and political travels to and from Albany, all Haudenosaunee defied Governor Burnet’s efforts to impinge on their profitable business practices and preserved a social relationship that proved of vital importance to resisting further efforts of colonial New York authorities to impose legal jurisdiction over Haudenosaunee individuals and their lands. In July 1730 a delegation of Onondaga and Mohawk headmen arrived in Albany to offer condolences for Jacob Brouwer, an Oswego trader murdered the previous month near the Oneida Lake portage by a drunken Onondaga man named Kindiacko.88 Aware that colonial legal precedent would demand the delivery of Kindiacko for execution, the headmen reminded the commissioners that they did not hold intoxicated individuals responsible for their crimes. They then sought to encourage a spirit of clemency among the commissioners by recalling their own pardoning of a “Christian” who had murdered a principal Seneca headman and by recounting several other killings of Haudenosaunee individuals that had gone unpunished. The headmen concluded by asserting the importance of the condolence practices that formed the root of the Covenant Chain alliance and expressed their hope that the commissioners would not behave like “drunkards or Madmen” themselves in this case, which would only encourage francophile sentiment among the confederacy nations.89 The diplomatic grace and rhetorical skill of the Onondagas’ and Mohawks’ address stymied the commissioners, who offered in response only their own interpretation of the Covenant Chain’s provision obligating the Haudenosaunee to “make satisfaction” for any mischief committed against the English, followed by their own list of alleged murders committed by Haudenosaunee individuals on settlers that had gone unpunished. Aware that demanding the delivery of Kindiacko “would

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have proved Ineffectuall” given the arguments made by these “subtile Barbarous People,” the commissioners referred the matter to Governor Montgomerie.90 In May 1731 the matter was resolved by a compromise: Haudenosaunee authorities promised in a public conference to execute Kindiacko for his crime, after which Montgomerie immediately granted the Onondaga offender a reprieve on the grounds of his intoxicated state at the time of the murder. This de facto recognition by colonial authorities of the Onondagas’ and Mohawks’ interpretation of legitimate criminal jurisdiction was facilitated by the confederacy leadership’s leveraging their refusal earlier that year to permit the French Canadian Indian Agent Louis-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire the right to build a trading post at Irondequoit (modern Rochester, New York).91 As the public reminder of parallel negotiations with French officials in 1731 made clear, the maintenance of close ties of communication with French Canada proved invaluable in Haudenosaunee efforts to preserve their independent status in Covenant Chain relations with the Albany Commissioners.92 By portraying the French as desirable alliance partners and by backing up these claims with plausible threats, Haudenosaunee negotiators gained the solicitous attention of the Albany Commissioners and converted fears of their desertion to Canada into effective bargaining power. The threat of mass migration to Laurentian Haudenosaunee communities was invoked frequently by the Mohawks in their public objections to an outbreak of speculative claims upon their lands after 1730.93 Since Theyanoguin directed pointed criticism toward the Albany Commissioners for their role in this ongoing dispute over Mohawk lands in 1753,94 the involvement of the Albany Commissioners in this matter merits careful reconsideration. Following the fortification of the frontier post of Oswego in 1727, which afforded New York’s settler population a greater sense of security in the Mohawk River Valley, speculative interest in laying future claim to Mohawk territory increased.95 Published records indicate that at least thirty-eight (or 73%) of the fifty-two individuals who served as commissioners of Indian affairs between 1723 and 1755 were involved at some point in their lives in the patenting of New York’s frontier lands and that at least eight of these individuals acquired Indian deeds to substantiate their claims.96 Yet it is important to note that this extensive speculative activity by members of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs (and others) translated neither into the immediate arrival of a substantial settler population in the colony nor into the effective dispossession of the Haudenosaunee proprietors until long after legal control over Indian relations had passed out of the commissioners’ hands. Patents to Haudenosaunee lands, many of them obtained by fraudulent means, certainly

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antagonized confederacy leaders (especially those of the Mohawks), but given the complex provincial land granting process,97 these patents (even when supported by deeds) did not constitute clear title to Native territory.98 Patents to Haudenosaunee land in colonial New York during the pre-Revolutionary era amounted in reality to little more than speculative claims to be redeemed in the distant future by the patent holders’ heirs, and they might best be viewed as a strategy of investment diversification by possessors of substantial capital.99 The dilemma of Philip Livingston’s widow, whose husband was a prominent patenter of Mohawk lands, is instructive. She testified in 1761 that despite her husband’s extensive claimed holdings, no attempt could be made to settle or to develop the land “so long as an Indian remained alive.”100 Ironically, the effect, if not necessarily the intent of this extensive patenting was to restrict the flow of settlement into Haudenosaunee territory until the era of the American Revolution.101 Despite the ease of penetration afforded by the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, the growth of New York’s settler population was comparatively slow paced and geographically constricted before 1775.102 Close examination of Haudenosaunee land disputes prior to 1755, as they involved the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, reveals a more complex situation than that offered by deterministic interpretations of early, ongoing, and inevitable settler encroachment on Haudenosaunee territory. The most common Haudenosaunee complaints regarding land involved threats to their power to choose to whom they sold land, illicit extensions of existing sales, and disagreements over the rights and responsibilities of ownership of a given tract of land.103 Two significant controversies over land patents in Mohawk country involving members of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs developed after 1730. On 9 July 1730 Albany’s city leaders registered their concern over what they regarded as illegitimate settler encroachment on a tract of flatlands along both sides of Schoharie Creek, south of the Mohawk River. Arguing that this land had been granted to the City of Albany in Governor Thomas Dongan’s 1686 charter, city officials sent Aldermen Ryer Gerritse (then appointed as a commissioner of Indian affairs), Cornelius Cuyler, Recorder Dirck Ten Broeck (also a commissioner of Indian affairs), and Mayor Johannes De Peyster to “the Moquas country” in October 1730 to secure a deed for this tract, known as the Mohawk Flatts or as Tiononderoge for its proximity to the “Lower” Mohawk village of that name.104 Once obtained, the City of Albany’s deed encompassed 1,000 acres, which overlapped with competing patents issued to Walter Butler and John Lindesay for a much larger tract of land near Tiononderoge. In the ensuing legal

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conflict, which came to a head at the September 1733 conference with Governor William Cosby, the Mohawks learned that the city’s deed encompassed not only the site of their village, but also their “best planting ground.”105 After Cosby exposed the fraudulent attempt of Albany officials to pass off this deed of trust as a deed of conveyance, the Mohawks “cried out with one voice that they were cheated” and threatened immediately to leave as a body for the Laurentian villages. Cosby, who had an extensive personal interest in Butler’s competing deed, then handed over the city’s deed, which the Mohawks “with great rage tore in pieces and then threw it into the fire.” The Mohawks then granted the 1,000 acre tract in trust to the Crown and granted to Cosby, via Butler, a deed to at least 36,000 acres of nearby, less valuable land as compensation for thwarting the city’s fraudulent actions.106 The other high profile conflict concerned Philip Livingston’s efforts between 1729 and 1731 to patent an extensive tract of land in the Mohawk River Valley that included the “Upper” Mohawk village of Canajoharie.107 Eight aggrieved Canajoharie headmen appeared before the Albany Commissioners in April 1732, and after reminding the commissioners of their obligations under the terms of the Covenant Chain alliance to prevent any “mismanagement or misunderstanding” and to “preserve the [Covenant Chain] clean and unspotted,” they announced that “Mr. Livingston has murdered us in our sleep, for our Land is our Life.”108 Canajoharie headman Torighjories expressed similar concerns less than two months later, warning that land fraud would “occasion a dispute and dispersion of the Six Nations” to Canada and elsewhere and threatening to take these complaints to the “Boston, or Pensilvania governments” if the Mohawks could not find redress at Albany.109 Significantly, the Mohawks’ principal concern in this case was not an anticipated flood of settlers but the threat that Livingston’s Canajoharie patent posed to their leasing arrangements with Palatine Germans already settled on those lands.110 Livingston and his fellow patentees never attempted to settle the land, but the Mohawks continued to complain of his patent. When one Teady Magin attempted in 1752 to patent an 8,000 acre parcel adjoining the Canajoharie patent, the Mohawks’ anger boiled over. They had reserved this tract for their German tenants, and their discontent over the failure of colonial authorities to recognize their interests provided one impetus for Theyanoguin’s 1753 outburst,111 which in turn led to the Albany Congress of 1754.112 All of the Canajoharie patentees (including Livingston’s heirs), except George Klock, released their claims to the patent at the 1754 Albany Congress, and Governor DeLancey resolved the matter of Magin’s adjoining patent by granting the latter’s claimed tract to the

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Germans then residing on it. While much of the surrounding land was patented by settlers after 1760, the Mohawks and their German tenants retained the best lands until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.113 These high-profile cases demonstrate that the Albany Commissioners’ role in land patenting, corrupt though it was, did not translate into rapid, large-scale dispossession and impoverishment of their Haudenosaunee neighbours.114 Indeed, in these habits the Albany Commissioners were certainly not alone. Several of the commissioners’ most prominent contemporary critics and rivals, including William Johnson and Cadwallader Colden, also employed their positions and influence to acquire speculative claims to land in Haudenosaunee territory.115 It is apparent, however, that despite the commissioners’ efforts to employ their meetings as a forum for disaffected Haudenosaunee to air their grievances over land and to have them referred to the appropriate colonial authorities for resolution,116 certain Mohawk leaders came to believe that the degree of self-interest among the commissioners would prevent these matters from ever being fully resolved to their satisfaction. Yet it is also important to note that the Albany Commissioners did act on occasion to impede the speculative process. In 1737, for example, they effectively thwarted a controversial attempt by Lieutenant Governor George Clarke to purchase land near Irondequoit by arranging for a deliberate mistranslation of the size of the tract to ensure that Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga delegates then present in Albany rejected it out of hand.117 Clarke retaliated in 1738 by drastically reducing the number of commissions issued for service with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, banning the use of taverns as venues for commissioners’ meetings, and replacing many long-time commissioners with his own appointees.118 The newly appointed Albany Commissioners received a quick education in Haudenosaunee means of conflict resolution during their first year in office. In 1739 the Oneidas, dissatisfied with the indifferent attitude of the Albany Commissioners to their complaints about competition from Palatine German settlers in the increasingly lucrative business of portaging the merchandise of Oswego traders at Oneida Lake, took matters into their own hands. A significant number of Oneidas “removed with their Familys” to “the Great Carrying Place that leads to Oswego” in order to “hinder the Germans from rideing over their goods as they did last year.”119 Confronted with this determined attitude of the Oneidas, the commissioners resolved the conflict by promising the Oneidas the right to continue to employ themselves in the carrying trade and then issuing a large present of ammunition and clothing.120 Despite a minimal annual budget of £170 (provincial currency)121 and chronic shortfalls in funding from the New York Assembly after

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1738,122 the Albany Commissioners maintained smiths in the Seneca country and struggled with the provincial Assembly to offset the Crown’s ongoing negligence in issuing annual presents for their Haudenosaunee allies.123 When food shortages struck the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Oneidas during the summer of 1741, the Albany Commissioners issued generous supplies of provisions and ammunition for their allies.124 In the minds of the commissioners, these expenditures represented a necessary component of frontier defence against the aggressions of New France,125 but in the minds of the Haudenosaunee, these actions reflected the commitment of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs to the Covenant Chain alliance.126 A prominent element of the Covenant Chain alliance as envisioned by Haudenosaunee Confederacy leaders was the Albany Commissioners’ recognition of their neutral status in wartime. In the midst of anticipated imperial conflict between New France and the AngloAmerican colonies, twelve Laurentian Haudenosaunee headmen arrived in Albany in late September 1742 to renew with their Mohawk kinsmen (including Theyanoguin) the neutrality agreement encompassing Canadian authorities, the Laurentian villages, the confederacy, and “all of the King of England’s subjects” in the northern colonies.127 After the declaration of King George’s War in 1744, Onondaga headman Canasatego spoke proudly of the confederacy’s existing neutrality agreement with the Laurentian Haudenosaunee as an example of the power of unity to an audience of Anglo-American colonial authorities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He urged his listeners to follow the Haudenosaunee example as the best means of defending themselves against the French.128 An unidentified Haudenosaunee speaker offered similar advice to New York governor George Clinton at Albany in June 1744,129 but Clinton, citing the exigencies of war, endeavoured to impose new demands on his Haudenosaunee allies. Ignoring precedent to the contrary, Clinton insisted that any subsequent Haudenosaunee neutrality agreement must incorporate all the Indian nations in Canada in a binding nonaggression pact “with all his Majesties subjects on this continent.”130 Failing this, Clinton demanded that two warriors from each of the Haudenosaunee nations should travel immediately to Oswego to serve as scouts.131 Clinton’s innovative impositions illustrated the ways that intensifying imperial rivalry in North America posed a serious threat to Haudenosaunee neutrality as mediated at Albany. Rumours reached New York in August 1744 that the Mohawks of Kahnawake had abandoned the neutrality agreement and taken up “the French hatchet.”132 The next month, a delegation of thirty senior Mohawk and Oneida headmen, anticipating Theyanoguin’s speech nine years later, expressed disgust

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at the inability of the cash-strapped Albany Commissioners to offer them a “handfull of powder” and declared the Covenant Chain broken.133 Although viewed as having lost effective control of Indian relations,134 the commissioners defended themselves vigorously against criticism of their policies after 1744 and continued to execute their duties despite ongoing lack of support from the New York Assembly and interference from Governor Clinton.135 In February 1745 the Albany Commissioners travelled to Tiononderoge to defuse a false (but potentially serious) rumour of a planned attack on the Mohawk town by the citizens of Albany.136 Their alertness and diligence in quelling this disturbance earned the praise of Governor Clinton, who admitted that if the commissioners had not undertaken this task, “in all likelyhood we should have lost our Indians.”137 The very next month, the Albany Commissioners pledged a monthly pension of twenty shillings to Theyanoguin in an effort to smooth relations with his village of Canajoharie.138 When the Albany Commissioners received confirmation in August 1745 that the Kahnawakes had taken up arms on behalf of New France in King George’s War, they realized that “we are now brought to the point that we must persuade the Indians to fight the French, or they will persuade them to fight against us.”139 Neutrality, in other words, was no longer a viable option. The commissioners sent Governor Clinton a lengthy list of recommendations for improving frontier defences, issued warnings of the potential for French-allied Indian raids against New England frontier towns,140 and imposed an embargo on trade for the Laurentian Haudenosaunee at Albany.141 Haudenosaunee leaders responded to this situation by continuing to assert the integrity of the neutrality agreement, arguing that the terms of the “hatchet” accepted by the Laurentian communities involved only a promise to respond to any aggression from AngloAmerican forces, not to initiate offensive raiding.142 Yet authorities in the northern British colonies, smelling victory after the June 1745 capture of Louisbourg by a Massachusetts provincial expeditionary force,143 grew less tolerant of the notion of Haudenosaunee nonalignment in this escalating conflict. In August 1745, after a party of Algonquin warriors descended from Canada’s Laurentian Valley and scalped two men on the Massachusetts frontier, Massachusetts governor William Shirley declared war on all “Canada Indians” for this ostensible violation of the neutrality agreement negotiated at Albany in 1744.144 The Albany Commissioners urged Haudenosaunee Confederacy leaders to arrange for the Algonquins to “make satisfaction to the Governor of Boston for the murders committed upon their people,” but this unprecedented interpretation of what constituted legitimate

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expectations of the Haudenosaunee-mediated neutrality agreement assumed a degree of confederacy jurisdiction over their Native neighbours that the Haudenosaunee never possessed.145 Clinton’s incompetent handling of an intercolonial conference with the Haudenosaunee at Albany in October 1745 further exacerbated the crisis.146 Unable to elicit a pledge of immediate military assistance from the confederacy, Clinton falsely attributed his failure to the conduct of the Albany Commissioners in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle.147 Hard on the heels of this diplomatic misadventure came the devastating French and alliedIndian raid in mid-November 1745 on the town of Saratoga, a mere thirty miles from Albany.148 The Albany Commissioners realized that the attack on Saratoga, which resulted in forty-one people taken captive and as many as thirtyseven people killed (including nine unidentified members of the “Six Nations”),149 had “removed all hopes of a neutrality,” and they arranged for Mohawk scouting parties to keep watch over the New York frontier.150 Theyanoguin cooperated reluctantly with these measures,151 but the Albany Commissioners were unable to overcome the determination of the confederacy leadership to avoid involvement in the war,152 despite repeated attempts to convince them to make use of the English “hatchet” against the French.153 Although the Albany Commissioners argued that the failure of Clinton and the Assembly to commit adequate financial resources to defending the frontiers had prevented them from breaking the neutral stance of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,154 the commissioners became the convenient scapegoat for New York’s wartime crisis in Indian affairs. As commander of military operations in North America between 1746 and 1748, Clinton enjoyed the combined salaries of a lieutentant general and a colonel, as well as control over the payrolls and supplies for thousands of provincial troops. Clinton effectively took over provincial Indian policy in early 1746, bypassing the Albany Commissioners in favour of private agents whom he and William Shirley paid handsomely out of their own salaries.155 William Johnson, foremost among these agents, burst onto the diplomatic scene with a colourful performance at an August 1746 conference, in which he “dressed himself after the Indian manner, [and] made frequent Dances according to their Custom when they excite to War,” subsequently earning an appointment as “Colonel of the Six Nations” from Clinton.156 Emerging as an effective rival to the commissioners (both economically and politically) during King George’s War, Johnson focused on encouraging his Mohawk neighbours to undertake military service on behalf of the Crown through liberal outlays of food, clothing, weapons, and cash as well as through bounties for scalps and prisoners at a time when the

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Albany Commissioners were devoid of funds.157 The commissioners continued in office until November 1746, when Theyanoguin informed them that newly appointed “Colonel” William Johnson would be taking their place. The Albany Commissioners then tendered their resignations and, on Clinton’s orders, turned over their records to Johnson.158 The appointment of Johnson to replace the Albany Commissioners did not usher in a new era of happiness for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Previously, the Albany Commissioners had endeavoured to maintain ties to all the constituent nations of the confederacy. Under Johnson’s management, Indian relations in colonial New York came to revolve around his personal relationship with Theyanoguin and the Mohawks of Canajoharie.159 In his official correspondence, Johnson regularly (and erroneously) characterized the Mohawks as “heads” of the confederacy160 and misrepresented Theyanoguin as “chief leading sachem among the Five Nations.”161 Theyanoguin reciprocated by stating his preference for Johnson as the individual “to whom we may bring our news, and from whom we may receive News,”162 and by asserting that “one half of Colonel Johnson” belonged to the Mohawks.163 Zeroing in on what he regarded as the Albany Commissioners’ key failing, Johnson pressed the Haudenosaunee relentlessly for the remainder of the war to abandon their neutrality policy. Yet Johnson’s political influence was confined to a small number of Mohawk warriors (headed by Theyanoguin) who participated in a few minimally successful raids on the Canadian frontier until disaster struck in late May 1747, when Theyanoguin unwittingly led a mixed party of Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, and New York militiamen into an ambush on the outskirts of Montreal. Nineteen members of the party were killed, and fifteen were taken prisoner (including eight Mohawks).164 Johnson laboured to retrieve the Mohawk warriors held captive in Canada, but up against the more talented and experienced corps of French Canadian officials, he floundered badly. Four of the Mohawk captives died in Canadian prisons, and two were not released until 1750.165 By October 1747 the New York Assembly, in a “Remonstrance” of Clinton’s conduct in managing the war, dismissed Johnson’s inflated reports of these raiding parties’ successes as “the Invention of his own Brain.” Astonished by the expenditures that Johnson had incurred, the assemblymen expressed their preference for the Albany Commissioners’ policy of supporting Haudenosaunee neutrality, which in their view demonstrated proper regard for the expressed desire of the confederacy as a whole and also saved the expense of distributing lavish amounts of goods and services to secure the notoriously fickle allegiance of a few Mohawk warriors.166 These identical arguments would

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be advanced by the United States Continental Congress in 1775,167 but in 1747 the notion of recognizing Haudenosaunee neutrality within the Covenant Chain alliance gained few adherents. Clinton and his colleagues in British imperial administration favoured strong assertion of the royal prerogative in New York, and increased centralization of control over Indian affairs figured prominently in their calculations.168 This struggle among different elements of New York settler society for control over their end of the Covenant Chain alliance held significant implications for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee leadership in Onondaga never deviated from their officially neutral stance, arguing that Theyanoguin and his fellow Mohawk raiders had acted “on their own Accord, without the approval of the Six Nations Council.”169 Theyanoguin and other Mohawk warriors, having antagonized the other confederacy nations, and having burnt their bridges to Canada by taking French scalps, would find their fortunes increasingly tied to Johnson. Yet Johnson’s evident lack of diplomatic clout led even the Mohawks to grow weary of his theatrical efforts to legitimize himself (ironically by cribbing from the Albany Commissioners’ records then in his possession),170 and they effectively ignored his overtures for the remainder of King George’s War. In April 1751, after the New York Assembly refused to pay his accounts, Johnson resigned his colonelcy in protest, leaving a void in the Covenant Chain.171 Haudenosaunee leaders voiced concern over the absence of any representation from New York in the Covenant Chain, but their requests for the reappointment of some official individual or body to maintain the alliance went unheeded for over eighteen months after April 1751, a sacrifice to Governor Clinton’s bitter conflict with the New York Assembly.172 Finally, in November 1752, Clinton permitted the Assembly to reestablish the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs.173 Writing a dozen years after the fact, Johnson claimed that the reappointment of the Albany Commissioners had constituted the primary factor motivating Theyanoguin’s bitter speech of June 1753.174 Yet it is clear that Theyanoguin’s rationale for breaking the Covenant Chain cannot be taken wholly at face value if one considers not only his personal interest in seeing Johnson returned to power, but also his documented willingness to engage with the reconstituted Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs. Given the ways that the Albany Commissioners distributed their limited resources more equitably among the Haudenosaunee, it is not surprising that former beneficiaries of Johnson’s largesse like Theyanoguin could be moved to complain publicly about the commissioners’ shortcomings. The reconstituted Albany Commissioners swore their oath of office just two weeks after Theyanoguin pronounced the Covenant Chain

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broken,175 and they immediately worked to resurrect the diplomatic neutrality between the confederacy and the Laurentian Haudenosaunee that had served all parties so effectively prior to 1745.176 Although endowed with a mere fraction of the spending power enjoyed by Johnson, the Albany Commissioners still managed to provide many of the services essential to the maintenance of the Covenant Chain alliance. They met with all nations of the confederacy, offered condolence ceremonies for deceased Haudenosaunee headmen, and confirmed their replacements.177 They offered redress for Haudenosaunee complaints of poor treatment in the fur trade,178 paid Haudenosaunee scouts to patrol the northern New York frontier,179 issued supplies of provisions to Haudenosaunee communities,180 and arranged for the repair of Haudenosaunee weapons.181 Even Theyanoguin seemed impressed. By December 1753 he expressed cautious optimism that the reappointment of the Albany Commissioners would lead to the Covenant Chain being “better managed than by one person.”182 Despite the Albany Commissioners’ conscientious performance of their duties, which included collaborating with Pennsylvania authorities in the redemption of three Indian traders from that colony held captive at Kahnawake,183 the 1754 Albany Congress and renewed intercolonial warfare in the Ohio Valley led to their final demise. In a public speech at the Albany Congress, Theyanoguin, arguably acting at Johnson’s behest, reprised his role from the previous year, accusing the Albany Commissioners of neglecting their obligations to the Haudenosaunee.184 Johnson also offered a dramatic speech on the last day of the Albany Congress, making an ardently patriotic appeal for unified British management of Haudenosaunee relations in order to compete effectively with the French.185 The commissioners tried to defend themselves, but the damage had been done.186 Although Theyanoguin did not speak for the entire confederacy, the scathing tone of his language aroused significant alarm throughout the northern AngloAmerican colonies in 1753. Provincial and British imperial officials alike scrambled to address the grievances that threatened to sever permanently the Covenant Chain.187 Furthermore, Theyanoguin’s words offered vital supporting testimony to the arguments that Johnson’s non-Native supporters had advanced relentlessly since 1751 regarding the comparative superiority of French relations with the Haudenosaunee, the alleged mismanagement of the Covenant Chain by the Albany Commissioners, and the appointment of Johnson in their stead as the only possible solution to the problem.188 Concerned about the “altogether undefensible” state of Albany,189 the commissioners negotiated another neutrality treaty between the confederacy and the Laurentian Haudenosaunee in August 1754,190

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but by then the British Crown would tolerate the neutrality of neither Albany nor the Haudenosaunee. Theyanoguin hedged his bets, as the September 1754 incident in which he and Paulus made “Everything as Right as Can Be” indicates, but once the Board of Trade learned of George Washington’s surrender of Fort Necessity and read the proceedings of the Albany Congress in October 1754, the days of the Albany Commissioners were numbered. By April 1755 British regular troops would be sent to America, Johnson would be appointed to manage Indian relations throughout the Northeast,191 and the terms of the Covenant Chain alliance would be irrevocably altered for the future.192 From 1723 to 1755 the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs recognized and promoted the self-sustaining neutrality policy of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. After the imperial takeover of colonial Indian affairs in 1755, Johnson subverted the interests of the confederacy to imperial objectives, working tirelessly to refashion the Covenant Chain into a military alliance to serve the interests of the British Crown in northeastern North America. In bypassing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy leadership in favour of direct appeals to warriors, Johnson undermined the traditional forms of Haudenosaunee authority within the Covenant Chain alliance.193 Failure to look beneath the surface of Theyanoguin’s description of the Albany Commissioners in 1753 as “No People But Devils” or to take seriously the nature of Paulus’s inscribed “Onenwahatirighsi Sa Gentho Skaghnughtudigh” leads to misunderstanding the extent to which the second quarter of the eighteenth century represented a period of vitality, not one of decline, in Haudenosaunee history. Although entangled with the colonial processes of neighbouring settler colonies, the Haudenosaunee elicited from the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs a crucial forum for airing and obtaining redress for their complaints, for exchanging formal ceremonies of condolence, for protecting rights of free trade, internal legal jurisdiction, and control over land transactions, for establishing diplomatic relations with other Native American nations, for gathering information on affairs in New York and other Anglo-American colonies, and for building consensus on neutrality among the constituent nations of the confederacy. The record of face-to-face interactions between the Haudenosaunee and the Albany Commissioners, as documented in the “Publick Register book of Indian Affairs” maintained by the commissioners, served as a transparent archive of past agreements, resolutions of disputes, and policy precedents to which both Haudenosaunee and colonial negotiators had access.194 These records, when consulted in their original, unabridged form reflect a viable, if complex and volatile, intercultural relationship, in which Haudenosaunee people exercised substantial

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agency over their own affairs. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence in the manuscript “Minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs” reflects the extent to which Haudenosaunee ideas, demands, protocols, and metaphoric rhetoric dominated the thoughts and actions of the ostensible “colonizers” who created the documents. This study of Haudenosaunee interactions with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs indicates that the longstanding historiographical consensus on inevitable eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee decline fails to fully capture the nature of Haudenosaunee experience at the time. Although contemporary proponents of the thesis of inevitable decline condemn the forces of colonialism, their approach nevertheless echoes longstanding American nostalgic laments over the “vanishing Indian”195 and naturalizes early North America as a place where “interracial conflict and the dispossession of Indian lands seems inexorable, unalterable, and foreordained.”196 This essay suggests that a return to primary sources can result in new understandings of the Haudenosaunee past that emphasize contingency and the range of latent possibilities present in the minds of historical actors at the time.197 The Covenant Chain alliance, as maintained by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy with the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs between 1723 and 1755, did not represent a mere foreshadowing of the eventual colonization of Haudenosaunee peoples and territories. Rather, this constantly negotiated set of intercultural agreements and customs provided several generations of Haudenosaunee leaders with the experiences, strategies, and recognition through which they successfully maintained their status as independent nations until the era of the American Revolution.

notes 1 I would like to thank James Merrell, José Brandão, David Silverman, Kurt Jordan, Tim Shannon, Audra Simpson, Sung Bok Kim, Jaap Jacobs, and Nancy Rhoden for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Responsibility for any shortcomings or errors remains my own. 2 Milton W. Hamilton, “Theyanoguin,” in Frances Halpenny et al., eds, Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–2005) (hereafter dcb), vol. 3, 622–4; Dean Snow, “Theyanoguin,” in Robert S. Grumet, ed., Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, 208–26 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). I use the term “headman” to denote individuals identified as civil or military leaders in their communities, as distinct from the fifty hereditary titled chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; see William N. Fenton, “The Roll Call of the Iroquois Chiefs: A Study of a Mnemonic Cane

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from the Six Nations Reserve,” in Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 111, no. 15, 1–73 (Washington, dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1950); Elisabeth Tooker, “The League of the Iroquois: Its History, Politics, and Ritual,” in Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast, vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indians, 418–41 (Washington, dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 424–8. I use the term “Haudenosaunee Confederacy” to denote the historical and political association of northern Iroquoian speaking peoples in modern upstate New York; see William N. Fenton, “Northern Iroquoian Culture Patterns,” in Trigger, ed., Northeast, 296–321at 319–20. Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, ny: Weed and Parsons, 1853–87) (hereafter nycd), vol. 6, 781–8 at 788. See also “Copy of Hendrick’s Speech to Clinton, Fort George, 12 June 1753,” George Clinton Papers (hereafter gcp), William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan (hereafter wlcl); and “Minutes of a Meeting Between His Excellency George Clinton and the Seventeen Mohawk Indians, Fort George, New York City, 12 June 1753,” Newcastle Papers, British Library Additional Manuscripts 32732, folios 668–78v. nycd, vol. 6, 909; Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600– 1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 165–7. On the history of Mohawk interest in the Hoosick region, dating back to their attack on Metacom’s forces during King Philip’s War, see Michael L. Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 160–6. “Minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1753–55,” Native American History Collection, (hereafter macia), wlcl, 28 September 1754. A contemporary Mohawk translation of this phrase, however, identifies it as a close approximation of “Ó:nen wahatirihwísa kèn:tho skahnotón:ti,” or “They are now finished with the matter and it is time to close,” a phrase associated with the opening and closing of formal addresses in the Mohawk language. Considered in the context of the conversation contained in the document, the commissioners’ 1754 translation was reasonably accurate. I am grateful to Dr Taiaiake Alfred of the University of Victoria for his assistance in obtaining a translation of this phrase from Margaret Peters of the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. nycd, vol. 6, 870–1. Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1969), 111–48; Laurence M. Hauptman, “Refugee Havens: The Iroquois Villages of the Eighteenth Century,” in Christopher Vecsey and Robert Venables, eds, American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 128–39; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 239–40; Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous

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Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: Norton, 1984), 289–90, 363–5; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 271, 275–6; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 218, 262, 401–2; Dean Snow, The Iroquois (Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1994), 144–5; William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 481–512; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York: Knopf, 2000), 12, 21, 24; Timothy Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 24–30; William A. Starna, “The Diplomatic Career of Canasatego,” in William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, eds, Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 144–63. For a recent example of how this perspective has spread into more general scholarly surveys of this era, see Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2000), 11–16, 67, 119–24. Polly Swift Grimshaw, Images of the Other: A Guide to Microform Manuscripts on Indian-White Relations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 1. The classic study is Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Jennifer Roback, “Exchange, Sovereignty, and Anglo-Indian Relations,” in Terry L. Anderson, ed., Property Rights and Indian Economies: The Political Economy Forum, 5–27 (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999), 253–301. See William Wicken’s more optimistic reading in Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial: History, Land, and Donald Marshall, Junior (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 215–24. Three studies that make substantial use of the original manuscript records of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs are David A. Armour, “The Merchants of Albany, New York, 1686–1760” (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1965); Thomas E. Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686–1776 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); and Shannon, Indians and Colonists, esp. 17–51. For the period under consideration in this chapter, the original manuscript, “Minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs,” may be found in two locations. The “Minutes” for 1723 to 1748 constitute the final two of the original “four folio volumes” bound in 1751 (see ny cd, vol. 6, 731) and abridged by Wraxall in 1754. They are currently housed in the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa (hereafter nac), rg10, vols 1,819–21. Another, previously

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unknown body of “Minutes” (cited in note 6 above), which came to light at a Montreal auction in 1997, covers the period 1753–55. They are cited, respectively, as macia-nac, and macia-wlcl. Taken together, these two manuscript collections cover the period 1723–55 in approximately 2,000 folio pages. Wraxall’s treatment of this period, however, amounts to a little over 100 pages of printed text; see Peter Wraxall, An Abridgment of the Indian Affairs, Contained in Four Folio Volumes, Transacted in the Colony of New York, from the Year 1678 to the Year 1751, by Peter Wraxall (1754; reprint, ed. C.H. McIlwain, Cambridge, ma: Harvard Historical Studies, 1915) (hereafter wa), 144–251. The location of the original first two “folio volumes” remains unknown (see wa, lxxxviiilxxxix), but derivative fragments appear in “Schedule of Propositions Made by the Indians and Answers Given by the Commission at Albany, 1677–1719,” nac, rg10, vol. 1,839; “Continuation of Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations, for the Years 1707 through 1720,” in New York Historical Society, Collections 68 (1935): 357–434; Lawrence H. Leder, ed., The Livingston Indian Records, 1666–1723 (Gettysburg, pa: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1956); Daniel K. Richter, ed., “Rediscovered Links in the Covenant Chain: Previously Unpublished Transcripts of New York Indian Treaty Minutes, 1677–1691,” in American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 92 (1982): 45–85. See McIlwain’s assessment in wa, xcii. For more on Wraxall’s use of his Abridgment to advance his career in the management of New York’s Indian Affairs, see wa, 4–7; Joel Munsell, ed., The Annals of Albany, 10 vols (Albany: Munsell and Rowland, 1850–59) (hereafter aa), vol. 10, 145–9; Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar of New York Colonial Commissions, 1680–1770 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1929), 36, 38; James Sullivan et al., eds, The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany, ny: 1921–65) (hereafter wjp), vol. 9, 212n2; Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 1969), 58–61; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson: Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, ny: Kennikat Press, 1976), 81. On the possibilities of overlooked, “lower-level” documentary sources for new perspectives on existing interpretations of historical issues, see James Lockhart, Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 27–80. See also Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 5. See Richard L. Haan, “Covenant and Consensus: Iroquois and English, 1676– 1760,” in Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds, Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, 41– 57 (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 1987). On the importance of this type of evidence, see James H. Merrell, “’The Customes of Our Country’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan, eds, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, 117–56 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 125.

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18 See macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 111–11a, 163a. For a contemporary description of the commissioners’ records as the “Books of Precedents relating to Indian Affairs,” see John Ayscough to William Johnson, 30 June 1751, gcp, wlcl. 19 nycd, vol. 5, 784; vol. 6, 100–1. 20 For parallel case studies, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Richard Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter J. Marshall, 231–52 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 21 While recognizing the Eurocentric origins of the term “agency,” I use the term to capture in the most economical manner the multifaceted ways that Haudenosaunee peoples resisted settler colonialism and to undermine assumptions of the Haudenosaunee as “colonized” people prior to the American Revolution. For discussion of the term “agency,” see Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm, “Desperately Seeking Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi?” Canadian Historical Review (hereafter chr) 75 (1994): 543–56; Douglas Cole, J.R. Miller, and Mary-Ellen Kelm, “Desperately Seeking Absolution: Responses and Reply,” chr 76 (1995): 628–40; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Rethinking Agency, Recovering Voices,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 827–43. 22 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 23 For the concept of entanglement, I am indebted to Kurt Jordan’s pathbreaking study “The Archaeology of the Iroquois Restoration: Settlement, Housing, and Economy at a Dispersed Seneca Community, A.D. 1715–1754” (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2002). See also Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonization in the Pacific (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991); Rani T. Alexander, “Afterword: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact,” in James G. Cusick, ed., Studies in Culture Contact, in Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Papers, no. 25 (Carbondale, il: Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations, 1998), 476–95; Nan Rothschild, Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America (Washington, dc: The Smithsonian Institution, 2003), 1–32. 24 Harry M. Ward, “Unite or Die”: Intercolony Relations, 1690–1763 (Port Washington, ny: Kennikat Press, 1971), 140–7; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 25–6; Robert S. Allen, “The British Indian Department and the Frontier in North America, 1755–1830,” in Canadian Historic Sites, Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History, no. 14, 5–125 (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1975), 11–13; Shannon, Indians and Colonists, 172–3. See also John R. Alden, “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian

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Superintendencies,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (hereafter mvhr) 27 (1940): 193–210. Patricia U. Bonomi, “New York: The Royal Colony,” New York History (hereafter nyh) 82 (2001): 5–24 at 23; see also Michael J. Mullin, “Personal Politics: William Johnson and the Mohawks,” American Indian Quarterly 17 (1993): 350–8; Timothy Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: William Johnson and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter wmq) 3rd ser. 53 (1996): 13–43. For a contemporary estimate of Johnson’s abilities, see Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley (New York: MacMillan, 1912), vol. 1, 398–9. On the ongoing fascination of Johnson’s male contemporaries as well as subsequent scholars with the manner in which Johnson “bedded [Haudenosaunee] women,” see Kirk Davis Swinehart, “Indians, Objects, and Revolution,” http://common-place.dreamhost.com//vol-02/no-03/lessons/index.shtml (2002); wjp, vol. 9, 386; James T. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (1959; reprint, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 86–7; Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson: Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, ny: Kennikat Press, 1976), 304–5; Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 95–8. C.H. McIlwain, “Introduction,” in wa; Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, 29; Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, 33–4; Aquila, Iroquois Restoration, 259n4; Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 369–70; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 264; Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 448–64. Cadwallader Colden, “A Memorial Concerning the Fur Trade of the Province of New York, Presented to His Excellency William Burnet [10 November 1724],” in nycd, vol. 5, 726–33; Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, Which Are Dependent on the Province of New York in America, and Are the Barrier Between the English and French in that Part of the World, 2 vols (London, 1727–47). Archibald Kennedy, The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest (London, 1751). Peter Wraxall, “Some Thoughts Upon the British Indian Interest in North America, More Particularly as it Relates to the Northern Confederacy, Commonly Called Six Nations [9 January 1756],” ny cd, vol. 7, 15–31. Virtually all scholarly assessments of Dutch-Iroquois relations in New York concentrate on the preconquest New Netherlands era (c. 1624–64); see William A. Starna, “Assessing American Indian-Dutch Studies: Missed and Missing Opportunities,” nyh 84 (2003): 4–31. See also Lois M. Feister, “Indian-Dutch Relations in the Upper Hudson Valley: A Study of Baptism Records in the Dutch Reformed Church, Albany, New York,” Man in the Northeast (hereafter min) 24 (1982): 89–113. nycd, vol. 4, 177, 362–3; vol. 5, 983n; vol. 6, 439.

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32 Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 95–6. 33 Michael Kammen, ed., The History of the Province of New York, by William Smith, Jr. (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), vol. 1, 167; Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The English and Dutch Experiences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 259–85; Thomas E. Burke, Jr, Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, 1661–1710 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1991), 68–108; Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1992), 15; Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: IroquoisEuropean Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1993), 258–9. 34 Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (1960; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 204–29, esp. 207–8; Lawrence H. Leder, Robert Livingston (1654–1728) and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 134–5; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 137–8; Alan Tully, Forming American Politics: Ideals, Institutions, and Interests in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 65; Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 300. For examples of these commissions, see macia-nac, vol. 1, 819, 311; vol. 1,820, 49, 154–5, 178a-79; macia-wlcl, 15 June 1754; O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 39–40. 35 Edgar A. Werner, Civil List and Constitutional History of the Colony and State of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1891), 263. See also O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 21. 36 Alice P. Kenney, “Dutch Patricians in Colonial Albany,” in nyh 49 (1968): 249–83 at 260. See also the capsule biographies of many of these individuals in “Colonial Albany Social History Project,” http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany 37 Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 232–3; Armour, “Merchants of Albany,” 191–207. 38 On the nature of early modern Dutch colonization in North America, see Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–69; Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), esp. ch. 4. 39 Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1513–1765 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 137–42, 147–50. For more on Anglo-Dutch ethnic antagonism in New York, see John M. Murrin, “English Rights as Ethnic Aggression: The English Conquest, the Charter of Liberties of 1683, and Leisler’s Rebellion in New York,” in William Pencak and Conrad E. Wright, eds, Authority and Resistance in Early New York, 56–94 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1988).

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40 Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 (Cleveland, oh: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), vol. 57, 47, 95–7, 137; Frontenac au roi, [6 November 1679], France, Archives Coloniales, Série C11A, Correspondence générale, Canada, 122 vols, 1458–1784, microfilm copy in nac (hereafter ac, C11A), vol. 5, folios 12–16v; Mémoire de Duchesneau au ministre [16 November 1681], ac, C11A, vol. 5, folios 316–19; Jan Grabowski, “Searching for the Common Ground: Natives and French in Montreal, 1700–1730,” in James Pritchard, ed., Proceedings of the 18th Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (Cleveland: French Colonial Historical Society, 1993), 67–72. See also Alisa V. Petrovich, “Actors in the Politics of Fur: The Iroquois League and Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, 1672–1682,” ucla Historical Journal 16 (1996): 1–23. 41 James V. Wright, “The Prehistoric Transportation of Goods in the St. Lawrence River Basin,” in Timothy G. Baugh and Jonathan E. Ericson, eds, Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America, 47–71 (New York: Plenum Press, 1994). 42 M. Saurel à Duchesneau [14 November 1679], ac, C11A, vol. 5, folios 71–2; nycd, vol. 4, 692–3. 43 I use the term “Laurentian Haudenosaunee” to illustrate the connection of these communities to kinfolk in Haudenosaunee territory in modern upstate New York and to highlight the origins of these communities (after c. 1667) in the return of Haudenosaunee people to territory traditionally claimed as their own. These claims derived in part from use of the territory in hunting and in part from the amalgamation of at least some of the Iroquoian population first encountered by Jacques Cartier on the St Lawrence River in 1534 with the Mohawk nation later in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For an introduction to the voluminous scholarly literature on this question, see Robert D. Kuhn, Robert D. Funk, and James F. Pendergast, “The Evidence for a St. Lawrence Iroquoian Presence on Sixteenth Century Mohawk Sites,” min 45 (1993): 77–86; James F. Pendergast, “The Confusing Identities Attributed to Stadacona and Hochelaga,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 4 (1998): 149–67 at 150; William Engelbrecht, “Northern New York Revisited,” in J.V. Wright and Jean-Luc Pilon, eds, A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, 125–44 (Gatineau, qc: Canadian Museum of Civilization, Mercury Series, Archaeology Paper 164, 2004) 131–3. See also Alexander von Gernet, “The Date of Time Immemorial: Politics and Iroquoian Origins,” in André Bekerman and Gary Warrick, eds, Origins of the People of the Longhouse, 119–28, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Symposium of the Ontario Archaeological Society (Toronto: Ontario Archaeological Society, 1994). 44 Daniel J. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 6. Other studies of early Iroquoian political economy include Kit W. Wesler, “Trade Politics and Native Polities in Iroquoia and Asante,”

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Comparative Studies in Society and History 25 (1983): 641–60; and Peter L. Cook, “Symbolic and Material Exchange in Intercultural Diplomacy: The French and the Hodenausaunee in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Jo-Anne Fiske, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and William Wicken, eds, New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference, 75–100 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998). Nicolas Sanson, America: 1667, ed. Louis M. Bloch, Jr, trans. Pauline Carson Bloch and Robert Martinon (Cleveland, oh: Bloch and Company, 1959), 40; Kenney, Gansevoorts of Albany, 49–52; Jean Lunn, “The Illegal Fur Trade Out of New France, 1713–1760,” in Canadian Historical Association, Annual Report, 61–76 (1939); Charlotte Wilcoxen, Seventeenth Century Albany: A Dutch Profile, rev. ed. (Albany, ny: Education Department of the Albany Institute of History and Art, 1984), 59, 71; Jan Grabowski, “Les Amérindiens Domiciliés et la ‘Contrabande’ des Fourrures en Nouvelle-France,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec (hereafter raq) 24, no. 3 (1994): 45–52. For a detailed description of the Lake Champlain-Hudson River corridor, see Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 30–1. Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 49–55; Stefan Bielinski, “The People of Colonial Albany, 1650–1800: The Profile of a Community,” in Pencak and Wright, eds, Authority and Resistance, 1–26 at 1–3. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1764), ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1936), vol. 2, 104–6; Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 149. nycd, vol. 6, 739–40. See also Cadwallader Colden, “Letters on Smith’s History of New York,” in Collections of the New York Historical Society for 1868, 177–235 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1868), 199. Adolph B. Benson, ed., The America of 1750: Travels in North America by Peter Kalm (New York: Dover, 1964), vol. 1, 343–6. “Notes on Indian Affairs,” Loudoun Collection of Americana 460, Huntington Library, San Marino, ca. “Journal of an Officer Who Travelled in America and the West Indies in 1764 and 1765,” in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies, 365– 453 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 416. nycd, vol. 7, 953–55. See also William Shirley, “Sketch of a System for the Management of Indian Affairs in North America under One General Direction,” enclosed in his letter to the Lords of Trade, 5 January 1756, in Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, vol. 2, 376–7. wa, 5, 88, 135, 180, 191–2. Arthur M. Buffinton, “The Policy of Albany and English Westward Expansion,” mvhr 8 (1922): 327–66; Norton, Fur Trade, 77–82.

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55 The most balanced secondary account of the “Grand Settlement of 1701” appears in Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montréal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), esp. 148–9, 154–5, 164–6. 56 See the criteria delineated in Efraim Karsh, Neutrality and Small States (London: Routledge, 1988), 32–43. 57 Jon Parmenter, “’L’Arbre de Paix’: Eighteenth Century Franco-Iroquois Relations,” French Colonial History 4 (2003): 63–80. 58 macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 65–7a, 235a-7a; macia-wlcl, 12 August 1754, 14 August 1754, 15 August 1754, 9 October 1754. 59 macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 68a, 73–3a, 111a-12a, 129–9a, 146a-152a, 195–5a, 211; vol. 1,820, 57. 60 William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treatymaking,” in Francis Jennings et al., eds, The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, 2nd ed., 3–36 (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 22–3; Michael M. Pomedli, “Eighteenth-Century Treaties: Amended Iroquois Condolence Rituals,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1995): 319–39 at 334. 61 As late as 1741, confederacy headmen described the Covenant Chain as originating in their early-seventeenth-century relationship with the Dutch; see macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 205a-7. 62 wa, 48. 63 macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 44, 114a-15a, 122–3a, 318, 319a-25a, 349a-51a; vol. 1,820, 259a-60. 64 macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 213a-14, 281. 65 macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 117, 134, 170–70a, 287–7a, 334a-35; vol. 1,820, 60a, 82, 120–20a, 141, 165, 171a, 173a-5, 198–8a, 222, 258, 307a. On the commission of five individuals for this service on 26 July 1738, including Peter Groenendyck, who later served as a commissioner of Indian affairs, see O’Callaghan, ed., Calendar, 24. I also thank Kurt Jordan for sharing his unpublished (2001) manuscript report “Smiths and Senecas: Iron Tool Production and Use at the Townley-Read Site, ca. A.D. 1715–1754.” 66 Nancy Hagedorn remarks upon the improvement in Anglo-American perception of Haudenosaunee diplomatic protocol after the mid-1690s, but attributes this change to interpreters; see her “Brokers of Understanding: Interpreters as Agents of Cultural Exchange in Colonial New York,” nyh 76 (1995): 399–408. Compare Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 543, who remarks solely on Johnson’s abilities in this regard. 67 For a discussion of this procedure, see Merrell, Into the American Woods, 20–2. 68 macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 16–16a, 40–40a, 50, 277–7a, 293, 295, 311–12; vol. 1,820, 26–7, 58–8a, 82a, 98–9, 187, 234; vol. 1,821, 28, 39, 50. Only rarely did

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the Albany Commissioners attempt to “install” their own preferred candidates; for one example, see macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 196a-7. nycd, vol. 6, 512–13. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 169–70a, 174a, 270–4a, 335a-6; vol. 1,820, 40–40a, 109, 127a, 130, 142, 169a, 171a, 177a, 198–8a, 397a; vol. 1,821, 53. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 202, 343a-4a; vol. 1,820, 35–6, 61, 77, 100–2, 127–7a, 140a, 173, 187, 218a, 225, 228, 271a, 327a-8; vol. 1,821, 68. See also James H. Merrell, “‘Their Very Bones Shall Fight’: The Catawba-Iroquois Wars,” in Richter and Merrell, eds, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 115–33; Aquila, Iroquois Restoration, 205–32; Ute Ferrier, “All that Is Past Is Buried in Oblivion: The Iroquois-Catawba Wars,” European Review of Native American Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 41–50. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 181–1a. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 141, 346, 348a; Beauharnois à ministre [10 October 1734], ac, C11A, 61, folios 303–13v. For more on these arrangements after the French and allied Indian raid on Deerfield in 1704, see Yves F. Zoltvany, Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil: Governor of New France, 1703–1725 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 45–51; Dale Miquelon, New France, 1701– 1744: “A Supplement to Europe” (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 42. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 63a-4, 86a; vol. 1,820, 55, 299a; vol. 1,821, 36, 54, 89–90, 96; Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1861), vol. 2, 858. wa, xciii. “An Act for the Encouragement of the Indian trade and rendring of it more beneficiall to the Inhabitants of this Province and for Prohibiting the Selling of Indian Goods to the French, (19 November 1720),” in Charles Z. Lincoln, ed., The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1894) (hereafter clny), vol. 2, 8–12. For renewals of this legislation, see ibid., 98–105 (7 July 1722), 150–3 (6 July 1723), 197–8 (24 July 1724), 248–50 (10 November 1725). See also Leder, Robert Livingston, 277; Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 166. Suggestions by contemporary critics of the “illegal” fur trade that the volume of traffic conducted by the Laurentian Haudenosaunee provided a flow of English trade goods sufficient to sustain the entire network of French Canada’s Native allies (see, for example wjp, vol. 2, 52) have been demonstrated to be groundless. Montreal smugglers tended to dump their less valuable “parchment beaver” pelts at Albany and restricted their purchases at Albany to stroud blankets and wampum (indicating that they could obtain from domestic suppliers the rest of the inventories that they needed for the Indian trade). Additionally, the Haudenosaunee-mediated trade with Albany rarely exceeded 20 per cent of the total value of Canadian peltry exports; see Matthew Laird, “The Price of Empire: Anglo-French Rivalry in the Great Lakes Fur Trade,

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1700–1760” (PhD thesis, College of William and Mary, 1995), 130–48; Thomas Wien, “Selling Beaver Skins in North America and Europe, 1720–1760,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 1 (1990): 293–317 at 313. nycd, vol. 5, 707, 728–30; vol. 7, 713–15; wa, 159. See also macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 141. clny, vol. 2, 150. See also Paul R. Huey, “Schuyler Flatts Archaeological District National Historical Landmark,” The Bulletin: Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association (hereafter Bulletin: jnysaa), no. 114 (1998): 24–31 at 29. Jon Parmenter, “The Significance of the ‘Illegal Fur Trade’ to the Eighteenth Century Iroquois,” in Louise Johnston, ed., Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade: Proceedings of the 8th North America Fur Trade Conference, Akwesasne, 40–7 (Cornwall, on: Akwesasne Notes, 2001). Colden, “Memorial Concerning the Fur Trade,” nycd, vol. 5, 732. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 43–3a, 44a-5, 101–1a, 103a-5a, 141–3. These individuals were Nicholas Schuyler, a nephew of Peter Schuyler, and his brother-in-law Jacob Wendell, son of Hermanus Wendell; see “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” New York State Library Bulletin 58 (March 1902): 1–580 at 296; Leder, Robert Livingston, 277n5; George W. Schuyler, Colonial New York: Peter Schuyler and his Family (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), vol. 2, 42, 306, 312–16. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 12a-13a, 25–9a, 42a, 45a, 82a, 188–9, 197a, 289–9a; vol. 1,820, 62–3, 253a, 256. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 11a; vol. 1,820, 61a, 69, 143, 173–3a, 203–3a, 211, 214–4a, 275a-276, 284a-5, 298–9; vol. 1,821, 52. clny, vol. 2, 281–94 (17 June 1726), 350–65 (11 November 1726); Leder, Robert Livingston, 281. For the complex 1725 hearings by the Board of Trade on this issue, see Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920–38), vol. 5, 163–78. On the efficacy of colonial lobbying during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, see Alison G. Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992), 95–125. Colden, “Letters on Smith’s History of New York,” 220–1; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (Millwood, ny: KTO Press, 1975), 193–4; Leder, Robert Livingston, 284. This veto did not prevent the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs in 1743 from issuing a summons to William Johnson to appear in Albany to swear to the volume of “Rum and Strouds” that he had sent to Oswego “for sale to the French or Indians”; see wjp, vol. 1, 19. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 317–18, 319a-20. Ibid., 321–2a. Ibid., 322a-4, 325. The reluctance of the Albany Commissioners to impose criminal jurisdiction over the Haudenosaunee was shared by Canadian

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officials; see Grabowski, “French Criminal Justice and Indians in Montreal, 1670–1760,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 405–29; Dêlage and Étienne Gilbert, “Les Amérindiens face à la justice coloniale française dans le gouvernement de Québec, 1663–1759,” part 1, “Les crimes capitaux et leurs châtiments,” raq 33, no. 3 (2003): 79–90; Dêlage and Étienne Gilbert, “Les Amérindiens face à la justice coloniale française dans le gouvernement de Québec, 1663–1759,” part 2, “Eau-de-vie, traite des fourrures, endettement, affaires civiles,” raq 34, no. 1 (2004): 31–41. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 336–8a. Ibid., 351a-2; nycd, vol. 9, 1030–1. Ibid., 327–7a. Among the former or current Albany Commissioners identified publicly by Theyanoguin as claiming more land than they had been sold were: Philip Livingston, “Capt. [John] Collins,” and Cornelius Cuyler; see nycd, vol. 5, 783–5. Ruth L. Higgins, Expansion in New York, with Especial Reference to the Eighteenth Century, Ohio State University, Contributions in History and Political Science, no. 14 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1931), 46, 67; Edith M. Fox, Land Speculation in the Mohawk Country, Cornell University, Studies in American History, Literature, and Folklore, no. 3 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1949), 12–15; Georgiana C. Nammack, Fraud, Politics, and the Dispossession of the Indians: The Iroquois Land Frontier in the Colonial Period (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 22–8; Wyllys F. Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier: Land Patenting in Colonial New York” (PhD thesis, Boston University, 1997), 34. The figure of thirty-eight individuals was derived by checking the names of Albany Commissioners contained in table 10.1 against the index to Calendar of New York Colonial Manuscripts, Indorsed Land Papers, in the Office of the Secretary of State of New York, 1643–1803 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1864) (hereafter cilp). The eight individuals possessing Indian deeds are noted on page 1053 of this publication. See also the individuals named in Higgins, Expansion in New York, 22–3, 58–61, 66–9. For a description of the patenting process, see Kammen, Colonial New York, 299–300; Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 134–7. wjp, vol. 11, 948–51. See the concise discussion in Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 314–29. See also Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life: Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo, ny: Prometheus Books, 1992), 53–66.

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100 wjp, vol. 3, 619. 101 Kammen, Colonial New York, 299; William Chazanof, “Land Speculation in Eighteenth Century New York,” in Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd, eds, Business Enterprise in Early New York, 55–76 (Tarrytown, ny: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1979), 55–7; Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 14–15; David L. Preston, “The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Iroquoian Borderlands, 1720–1780” (PhD thesis, College of William and Mary, 2002), 24–8. 102 See contemporary remarks by Colden (1732) in Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., The Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany, ny: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1849–51) (hereafter dhny), vol. 1, 381; and by Kalm (1749) in Benson, ed., America of 1750, vol. 1, 143, 331, 335. See also Donald W. Meinig, “The Colonial Period, 1609–1775,” in John H. Thompson, ed., The Geography of New York State, 121–39 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 135–7; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 573–637. 103 Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 21, 111; George S. Snyderman, “Concepts of Land Ownership among the Iroquois and Their Neighbors,” in William N. Fenton, ed., Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois Culture, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 149, 15–34 (Washington, dc: United States Government Printing Office, 1951), 21–4. See also Shannon, Indians and Colonists, 165. 104 “The City Records,” in aa, vol. 9, 64–6, 68–9, quotation at 72–3; “The Patent of Tiononderoga [sic],” in Joel Munsell, ed., Collections on the History of Albany, vol. 1, 355–69 (Albany, ny: J. Munsell, 1865–71); Cuyler Reynolds, ed., Albany Chronicles: A History of the City Arranged Chronologically, From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Albany, ny: J.B. Lyon, 1906), 205. Cuyler and De Peyster became commissioners of Indian affairs in 1734 (see table 10.1). 105 ny cd, vol. 5, 960–1; see also Fox, Land Speculation, 16–17; Nammack, Fraud, Politics, 24; Preston, “Texture of Contact,” 51. 106 ny cd, vol. 5, 961–2; see also vol. 6, 15–16; Cadwallader Colden, “Cadwallader Colden’s History of William Cosby’s Administration as Governor of the Province of New York, and of Lieutenant-Governor George Clarke’s Administration Through 1737,” in The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, Collections of the New York Historical Society (1917–35) (hereafter Colden Papers), vol. 9, 304–5; Fox, Land Speculation, 20; Nammack, Fraud, Politics, 25. Preston, “Texture of Contact,” 52–4, notes that William Johnson’s holdings in the Mohawk Valley derived from his uncle Sir Peter Warren’s purchase of 14,000 acres of Cosby’s portion of the land deeded to Butler, which Johnson was sent from Ireland to manage in 1738; see also Julian Gwyn, The Enterprising Admiral: The Personal Fortune of Sir Peter Warren (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 69–93. Terry, “Negotiating the

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108 109

110 111 112 113

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Frontier,” cites the size of the grant to Butler at 86,000 acres, which is corroborated in cilp, 207. However, a 1735 description of the deed (in cilp, 229) indicates that the tract was only 36,000 acres. cilp, 196; wjp, vol. 3, 618–20; vol. 10, 993–4; Higgins, Expansion in New York, 67–8; Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 121–2. See also Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk, 54n14, 88–9n4. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 355a-6. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 5–6, 8. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 273, notes the confederacy’s use of negotiations with Pennsylvania after 1728 as a “counterbalance” to the ostensible threats posed by both New York and New France to “Iroquois land tenure and political independence.” Yet it is clear that Mohawks themselves did not pursue direct ties to Pennsylvania, as no Mohawks are recorded present at any of the five official Six Nations’ meetings with Pennsylvania authorities between 1728 and 1744; see Samuel Hazard, ed., Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, pa: Theo. Fenn, 1838–53) (hereafter mpcp), vol. 3, 316, 435; vol. 4, 80, 583–5, 698–737; Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 362. On the distant character of Iroquois relations with Massachussetts authorities during the eighteenth century, see Richard R. Johnson, “The Search for a Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England,” Journal of American History 64 (1978): 635–41. Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 14, 90–1; Preston, “Texture of Contact,” 71–3. “Petition of Hendrick, Abraham, Paulus, and Other Indians Pertaining to a Land Grant, 8 February 1753,” gcp, wlcl; Colden Papers, vol. 9, 129–34. ny cd, vol. 6, 869–71, 885–8; dhny, vol. 2, 560–2, 613–14. On the economics of Mohawk land usage in the eighteenth century, see Dean Snow and David A. Guldenzpof, “The Mohawk Upper Castle Historic District National Historic Landmark,” Bulletin: jnysaa, no. 114 (1998): 32– 44 at 36. Subsequent conflict over this tract centred on Klock’s persistence in claiming title. See Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 91, 121–9, 198–9. For evidence of substantial Mohawk economic holdings in 1777, as determined from post-Revolutionary War claims of losses submitted to the British Crown, see David A. Guldenzopf, “The Colonial Transformation of Mohawk Iroquois Society” (PhD thesis, suny-Albany, 1987), 83–7, 191–208. Even if these estimates were inflated (as many Loyalist claims were), the diversity of holdings described within them do not support the notion of Mohawk communities as economically marginalized prior to 1775. For a similar survey of Oneida assets, see Anthony Wonderley, “An Oneida Community in 1780: Study of an Inventory of Iroquois Property Losses during the Revolutionary War,” Northeast Anthropology 56 (1998): 19–41. Johnson, during the interim between his appointments as colonel of the Six Nations and as superintendent of Indian affairs, purchased 10,000 acres of

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117 118

119

120 121

122 123 124

125 126

127 128 129 130

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land around Onondaga Lake from the Mohawks in 1751. He later claimed that his purchase was intended to prevent the rumoured establishment of a French post in the region; see cilp, 490; nycd, vol. 7, 840; wjp, vol. 1, 923– 9; vol. 13, 15–17; Terry, “Negotiating the Frontier,” 196. Colden also secured extensive land holdings for his children during his tenure as New York’s surveyor general; see Letterbooks of Cadwallader Colden, 2 vols, in Collections of the New York Historical Society for 1876 and 1877, vol. 1, 1876, 176–83. macia-nac, vol. 1,819, 327–7a, 352a-3, 355a-6a. See also Arthur M. Buffinton, “The Colonial Wars and Their Results,” in Alexander C. Flick, ed., History of the State of New York, vol. 2, 201–46 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 224. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 117a-118. Ibid., 154–5. Subsequent meetings occurred in Albany City Hall or in the private homes of various members. Oneida headman Othosonont took offence in 1738 at being forced to meet in City Hall, a place “sett apart for the correction of rogues and thieves”; see macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 156–6a. See also macia-wlcl, 10 September 1753. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 128a, 131, 133a-4, 140, 142a-4, 156–6a, quotations at 158–8a. For more on the history of the Oneidas’ “Carrying Place,” see T. Wood Clarke, Utica for a Century and a Half (Utica, ny: The Widtman Press, 1952), 5–6; John F. Luzader, The Construction and Military History of Fort Stanwix (Washington, dc: United States Department of the Interior, Division of History, Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, 1969), 1–14. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 161–3a. This was roughly equivalent to £100 sterling. See the conversion table in Beverly McAnear, The Income of the Colonial Governors of British North America (New York: Pageant Press, 1967), 36–7. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 141, 175a, 203–4a, 209a, 218 (annual budget figure), 226, 262a. Ibid., 164; nycd, vol. 6, 156–7. Ibid., 209a-10, 221a, 214. Only a few months after issuing this humanitarian aid, the Albany Commissioners learned that a hungry Oneida man had been beaten nearly to death after picking corn “without permission” on (future superintendent) William Johnson’s property; see macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 216a-17a. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 124–6. Ibid., 183–3a. See also Mary A. Druke, “Linking Arms: The Structure of Iroquois Intertribal Diplomacy,” in Richter and Merrell, eds, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 33. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 236–7a. mpcp, vol. 4, 732–5. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 282–2a. Ibid., 284a-5.

280 131 132 133 134 135 136

137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144 145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155

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Ibid., 291. Ibid., 298–300a. Ibid., 303a-5. John Lydius to George Clinton, 24 October 1744, Massachusetts Archives, vol. 31. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 349–50a, 355a-6a, 366–6a, 373–4a; vol. 1,821, 47, 71–2. macia-nac, vol. 1,821, 20–2. On the potential problems created by such rumours, see Gregory E. Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina Frontier,” wmq 3rd ser. 53 (1996): 527–60. Clinton to Lords of Trade, 27 March 1745, gcp, wlcl. macia-nac, vol. 1,821, 29. Ibid., 87–8. Ibid., 89–90, 96. Ibid., 85–8, 97–8. Ibid., 90–1. John R. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 94–9; Douglas E. Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 64–75. Spencer Phips to George Clinton, 23 August 1745, gcp, wlcl. macia-nac, vol. 1,821, 96. ny cd, vol. 6, 289–305. Ibid., 285–7. Paul Marin de la Malgue, “Journal contre Saratoga en 1745,” nac, MG18, N48. For the non-Native casualty figures, see François-Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil au ministre [4 October 1747], ac, C11A, 89, folios 168–71v. French authorities at Niagara offered condolences to the Mohawks in the spring of 1746 for the nine “Six Nations” killed at Saratoga; see macia-nac, vol. 1,821, 358a. macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 321a-3. Ibid., 324a-7. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 366–6a, 370a-2. Ibid., 343–3a, 386a-91a. ny cd, vol. 6, 286; macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 349–50a, 355a-6a, 366–6a, 373–4a; vol. 1,821, 47, 71–2; Tully, Forming American Politics, 130–2; McAnear, Income of the Colonial Governors, 26. Cadwallader Colden, “A Treaty between His Excellency the Governor of New York, and the Six Nations, and Other Nations, depending on Said Province [1746],” in Colden, History of the Five Indian Nations, vol. 2, part 2, 162–3; see also 164–5.

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157 Shannon, Indians and Colonists, 39, has computed Johnson’s total expenditures from December 1746 to November 1747 to exceed £3,400. See also Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, 5–7, 15–23, 46–52. 158 macia-nac, vol. 1,820, 405–6; wa, 248n-49n; Armour, “Merchants of Albany,” 213–17; Norton, Fur Trade, 189–90. 159 Shannon, Indians and Colonists, 30–51. 160 wjp, vol. 3, 466; vol. 4 52; vol. 6, 28. 161 wjp, vol. 9, 54. 162 ny cd, vol. 6, 720. 163 wjp, vol. 1, 342. 164 “Relation d’un coup fait sur un parti d’Anglais, Flamands, sauvages Agniez, Sonnontouans, Onnieouts des Cinq-Nations venus dans l’isle de Montréal [29 September 1747],” ac, C11A, 89, folios 237–40; nycd, vol. 10, 81–3, 89, 105, 108–10; Joseph L. Peyser, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre: Officer, Gentleman, Entrepreneur (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 85. 165 wjp, vol. 1, 239. Two of the captives were released by Canadian Governor Charles Beauharnois de la Boische in September 1747. Two others had died in prison by that time, and another two had died by September 1749. The two remaining Mohawk prisoners were finally released in 1750; see Johnson to George Clinton, 18 August 1750, gcp, wlcl; nycd, vol. 6, 527, 589–90; vol. 10, 144, 149. 166 ny cd, vol. 6, 619–20, quotation at 621. 167 Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 70–4. 168 Clinton to New York General Assembly, 24 April 1747, gcp, wlcl; Stanley N. Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1968), 165–81; Bonomi, A Factious People, 151–75. 169 Extract of Address of Conrad Weiser to the Pennsylvania Council, 9 July 1747, gcp, wlcl. See also mpcp, vol. 5, 83–9. 170 Johnson, “Journal of a Mission to the Iroquois, (24–26 April 1748),” George Clinton Papers, wlcl. See also wjp, vol. 1, 158–9. Johnson resorted on at least two other occasions to employing the authority of the Albany Commissioners’ records to substantiate his actions; see nycd, vol. 6, 969–70; vol. 7, 259. 171 ny cd, vol. 6, 540–1, 559; wjp, vol. 1, 314–15, 322–7, 339–44. 172 ny cd, vol. 6, 749–50. 173 macia-wlcl, 15 June 1754, contains the text of the 16 November 1752 commission. See also Robert Sanders to George Clinton, 26 November 1752, “Letterbook of Robert and John Sanders, 1742–1758,” nac, MG18, C6, 40. 174 ny cd, vol. 7, 714–15. 175 macia-wlcl, 3 July 1753.

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176 Ibid., 7 July 1753, 3 August 1753, 8 August 1753, 10 September 1753, 14 September 1753, 15 September 1753, 17 September 1753, 3 October 1753, 30 October 1753, 31 October 1753, 3 November 1753. 177 Ibid., 3 August 1754, 13 September 1754, 14 September 1754, 7 April 1755. 178 Ibid., 31 December 1753, 24 January 1754. 179 Ibid., 12 August 1754. 180 Ibid., 3 August 1754. 181 Ibid., 17 October 1754, 22 March 1755. 182 Ibid., 18 December 1753. See also nycd, vol. 6, 821. 183 macia-wlcl, 7 July 1753, 8 August 1753, 10 September 1753, 14 September 1753, 15 September 1753, 17 September 1753, 3 October 1753, 30 October 1753, 31 October 1753; ny cd, vol. 6, 795–6. 184 ny cd, vol. 6, 870–1. For contemporary suspicions of Johnson stagemanaging the Mohawks’ presence at the 1754 Albany Congress, see William Livingston, A Review of the Military Operations in North America, from the Commencement of the French Hostilities on the Frontiers of Virginia in 1753 to the Surrender of Oswego on the 14th of August 1756, In a Letter to a Nobleman (London, 1757), reprint in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, ser. 1, vol. 7 (1801), 75–6. 185 ny cd, vol. 6, 897–9. 186 macia-wlcl, 2 July 1754, 5 September 1754. 187 In December 1753, for example, New York governor James DeLancey obtained from the New York Assembly (in a rare unanimous vote) an allotment of £1,000 for presents for the Haudenosaunee; see Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New York (New York, 1764–66), vol. 2, 368, 375. 188 ny cd, vol. 6, 749–50; Samuel Hazard et al., eds, Pennsylvania Archives (Philadelphia and Harrisburg, 1852–1949), ser. 1, vol. 2, 116–17; Milton M. Klein, The American Whig: William Livingston of New York (New York: Garland, 1990), 379. 189 “Albany City Records, 1753–1783,” in Munsell, ed., Collections on the History of Albany, vol. 1, 81. 190 macia-wlcl, 12 August 1754, 14 August 1754, 15 August 1754, 9 October 1754. 191 Alden, “Albany Congress,” 199–210. 192 After his 1751 resignation from his provincial appointment, Johnson argued that the management of Iroquois relations could not be trusted to local or colonial authorities in New York since the Iroquois constituted a “foreign people” (Kammen, Colonial New York, 311–12) best dealt with directly by the Crown; see nycd, vol. 7, 971. See also Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “Imperia in Imperio: The Multiple Constitutions of Empire in New York, 1750–1777,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 321–79 at 368–9. Following Johnson’s tenure and a period of federal oversight of Indian relations during the Revolutionary War,

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state-level officials within New York returned wholeheartedly after 1783 to the practice of using locally appointed commissioners, with detrimental effects on Iroquoian land tenure; see Franklin B. Hough, ed., Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs Appointed by Law for the Extinguishment of Indian Titles in the State of New York, 2 vols (Albany, ny: J. Munsell, 1861); New York State Legislature, Assembly Document No. 51, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate the Indian Problem of the State of New York, Appointed by the Assembly of 1888, 2 vols, a.k.a. the “Whipple Report” (Albany, ny: Troy Press, 1889); Barbara Graymont, “New York State Indian Policy after the Revolution,” nyh 58 (1976): 438–74; Helen M. Upton, The Everett Report in Historical Perspective: The Indians of New York (Albany, ny: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1980); Laurence M. Hauptman, “Iroquois Land Issues: At Odds with the Family of New York,” in Christopher Vecsey and William A. Starna, eds, Iroquois Land Claims, 67–86 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988). Gail D. Danvers, “Gendered Encounters: Warriors, Women, and William Johnson,” Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 199–200. macia-wlcl, 2 July 1754. In contrast, during Johnson’s tenure as superintendent, these records were “lock’d up,” and even New York governor Henry Moore was denied access to them on a visit to Johnson Hall in 1768; see wjp, vol. 6, 276–7; wa, xciii-xcivn2. Key recent works on this issue include Joshua David Bellin, The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 154–82; Laura M. Stevens, “The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian,” in Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, eds, Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, 17–30 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 171–210; Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Gary Nash, “The Concept of Inevitability in the History of European-Indian Relations,” in Carla G. Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds, Inequality in Early America, 267–91 (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 1999), 267. See Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, “Amerindian Power in the Early Modern Northeast: A Reappraisal,” wmq 3rd ser. 61 (2004): 77–106.

11 Atlantic Microcosm The Royal American Regiment, 1755–17721 a l e x a n d e r v. c a m p b e l l

The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt published his favourable impressions of the United States after a lengthy sojourn in the new republic near the dawn of the nineteenth century. Among the residents featured in his travelogue was a benevolent New York squire, Augustine Prevost, who lived comfortably on a substantial property near Albany. Although a Genevan by birth, Prevost had accompanied his family to the New World with detachments of the Royal American Regiment four decades before. Surprisingly, his distinguished career as a British army officer was not held against him by neighbours whose respect he had gained through industriousness, business acumen, and a charitable nature. This Swiss immigrant had beaten his sword into ploughshares after more than twenty years with the colours and now enjoyed an easy retirement as a prosperous gentleman farmer.2 La Rochefoucault’s glowing profile of such an accomplished foreign Protestant has been overlooked by historians in their search for links between the Old and New Worlds. Scholarly preoccupation with social, economic, and cultural issues has drawn attention away from the king’s men, whose military activities do not fit neatly into a reconstituted empire inhabited by “traders, settlers, and migrants.” Yet a nuanced examination of one regular unit, the 60th (Royal American) Regiment of Foot, reveals that redcoats of all ranks were often engaged in the same pursuits that delineate present Atlantic-world constructs. Far from being a countercurrent to the mainstream of eighteenthcentury life, this line regiment formed a dynamic Atlantic microcosm.3 Metropolitan officials authorized the formation of the Royal American Regiment to strengthen inadequate Middle Colony defences at the

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outset of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Masterminded by an itinerant Swiss soldier of fortune, James Prevost, corps manpower was originally to have been drawn from the thousands of foreign Protestants who had relocated to the New World by mid-century. Strategic necessity in 1756, however, obliged Whitehall to double the regimental establishment, permitting English-speaking volunteers on both sides of the ocean to enlist. Within two years, most battalion elements began contributing to British successes at Louisbourg, the Ohio Forks, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Niagara, Quebec, Montreal, Martinique, and Havana. Although the regiment of 4,000 men was reduced to skeleton strength after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, two battalions remained on station with detachments engaged in the suppression of Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763–64). Almost a decade of garrison duty followed in Quebec, the Upper Posts, Charles Town, and New York until the troops sailed for the West Indies in 1772.4 If transoceanic migration is a hallmark of the Atlantic world, then the Royal American’s story illustrates how deeply involved the British military was in this aspect of Georgian life. The regiment traces its origins to a soldier of fortune whose initial overseas relocation plans were preempted by French naval action in 1755. Repatriated to London just after news of Major-General Edward Braddock’s debacle at the Monongahela River reached the capital, Major James Prevost, late of the Dutch Service, remedied his own straightened circumstances and Britain’s strategic problems by proposing that he be given command of a foreign Protestant defence force to be garrisoned chiefly in Pennsylvania.5 Fifty Continental mercenaries received commissions in the unit alongside more than 100 European noncommissioned officers (ncos) who were fluent in German.6 Few other passenger manifests bore the names of voyagers to the West destined so quickly to become governors, generals, legislators, and other Crown officials.7 The corps’s striking ethnic heterogeneity and broad Atlantic cast emerged even before recruiting officers reached the New World, with the names of 260 sentinels born in Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany already recorded on its muster rolls.8 The Highland volunteers appeared through the influence of the formation’s Scottish commandant, John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, while other North Britons were being engaged to augment the strength of the 35th and 42nd Regiments previously dispatched to America. In a similar fashion, subalterns reassigned from units on the Irish Establishment engaged suitable enlistees before they sailed for New York. Officers awaiting transit in London took advantage of recruiting opportunities in the capital, even as German-speaking guardsmen were drafted into the new colonial battalions.9

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The Admiralty Office was the next unexpected source of foreign Protestant manpower. Although the courts of St James’s and St Germain did not officially declare war until 17 May 1756, their respective naval forces had been harrying each others’ shipping for months, with the Royal Navy maintaining custody of any reinforcements found aboard enemy vessels. The French penchant for stocking their colonial garrisons with Swiss and German soldiers worked to the benefit of the Royal American Regiment, which was best prepared to utilize such human resources.10 With a growing number of detainees in coastal ports, the Duke of Cumberland determined that any Protestants among them would make suitable candidates for his overseas army. Two recruiting officers were dispatched to Portsmouth, where they entertained any prisoners willing to enter George II’s service for up to four years. Eager volunteers, preferring a redcoat to close confinement, had only to stow their possessions on adjacent transports that carried the remainder of the regiment’s officers and equipment to New York.11 Selective scrutiny of period documents leads most scholars to believe that warfare halted all European population transfer to the New World because hostilities interrupted transatlantic commerce and the supply of traditional bound labour to the New World.12 Analysis of metropolitan government records reveals, however, that the trade in strangers continued, as the Seven Years’ War actually created new opportunities for those who had previously been unable or unwilling to venture west. Foreign Protestant gentlemen commissioned by King George II aside, 60th recruiters stationed in the Holy Roman Empire enrolled more than a thousand reinforcements, who enthusiastically took the king’s shilling. Enlistment thereby became the primary agency through which the Auswanderung continued once hostilities broke out between rival imperial powers.13 Regional diversity distinguished this military migration from prior civilian outflows, which had emanated principally from five modern regions adjacent to the Rhine River: Alsace, Baden-Wurttemberg, Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz, and Switzerland. War Office returns indicate that only 54 per cent of all sentinels sprang from these seedbeds of the earlier German diaspora. The remainder came from Austria, Bayern, Brandenburg, Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Wesfalen, Sachsen, and Thuringen as well as from points beyond.14 Uprooted from their natal communities by previous army service, unemployed veterans living in larger centres like Aachen stepped forward to volunteer. British enlistment terms appeared most generous to this societal element. A redcoat’s daily salary of fifteen kreuzers far exceeded that offered by Austrian, Prussian, or Danish competitors, substantial food allowances were provided gratis by the royal commissary, and a

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maximum seven-year commitment to the colours was less onerous than indefinite or life service demanded by other European monarchs. Such incentives prompted the appearance of more enlistees than anyone expected.15 Not all of the volunteers were trained infantrymen. Hunger and hard times also proved advantageous for Prevost’s agents, anxious to fill empty holds awaiting on the Elbe River. This best explains the appearance of a number of Clausthal miners, from the Oberharz region of Niedersachsen, who entered His Britannic Majesty’s forces. They too were jobless after the closure of once viable silver operations due to water seepage in the deep shafts. Military service offered a better life in America, where steady employment would be supplemented by provincial land grants after a definitive peace.16 Similarly, Rhineland recruiting detachments piqued the interest of other civilians displaced by demographic pressures and partible inheritance practices. The added benefit of free provisioned transportation to the New World, normally a prohibitive expense of £5–10 for the passage alone, extended opportunities for family reunification to those whose relatives had already relocated to the colonies. Indeed, Palatinate operatives credited their large trawl to the fact that residents had “a number of their fellow countrymen in America and are very inclined to join them there.”17 Colonel James Prevost realized from the outset of his mission that the exclusion of soldiers with families from the ranks would jeopardize its success. While the marital status of volunteers is not recorded on contemporary returns, wives and children certainly were present aboard the troopships. A contract loophole, sanctioning twenty bandsmen, in addition to the British practice of employing sentinels’ sons as company drummers, allowed for the engagement of such juveniles. The arrival of “some little creaturs for drumrs” suggests that this was the contrivance used by European recruiting officers to convey eligible dependants across the Atlantic.18 Military migrants enjoyed several advantages over their civilian confreres normally shoehorned into cramped vessels by avarice businessmen anxious to maximize profits from every voyage. First, recruits, unlike others, were paid and provisioned while in transit; they were not required to defray the normal prohibitive relocation charges. Second, the army convention of allowing at least one-and-a-half cargo tons per passenger eliminated problems associated with overcrowding. Moreover, the presence of surgeons aboard each merchantman kept mortality rates extremely low.19 Finally, standard infantry health and hygiene practices also contributed to the welfare of the voyagers. Soldiers, under the watchful eye of superiors, were required to wash themselves daily, clean their berths frequently, and prepare their meals at regular hours.

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Such salutary group discipline was in marked contrast to the laissez-faire experience of most Europeans during the ocean crossing.20 Troops arriving from Stade through August and September 1756 joined 700 Pennsylvanian enlistees already encamped at the primary regimental depot on Governor’s Island, New York. Colonial recruiting parties fared well that first summer by courting both redemptioners and indentured servants alike. The former group of wayfarers, overwhelmingly married men with wives and children, had initially contracted with Rotterdam merchants to work for an unspecified American master in exchange for their family’s fare to the New World. Newcomers of this sort typically joined rural communities along the advancing frontier, but demand for such bound labour had evaporated following Major-General Braddock’s 1755 defeat. Consequently, unredeemed passengers trying to sustain a household in the squalid accommodations provided for them in the capital joined the Royal Americans because no other livelihood could be found.21 Bound labourers of all stripes also responded to the beat of the recruiter’s drum. For them, enlistment provided a way up and out of the desperate circumstances endured since arrival in America. Life was difficult for most white menials, subjected to the whims of callous masters who often treated more valuable property, such as slaves and artisans, with greater care than those bought solely to moil in fields, mines, and forges. Although a soldier’s annual pay of £12 was meager by civilian standards, it was greater than that earned by bondsmen, who received no compensation during their period of service. Strict military discipline, furthermore, appeared less draconian than continued existence under an overseer’s caprice, and the opportunity to see other parts of the continent proved inviting to those whose liberty of movement was curtailed by legal sanction. The additional guarantee of a land grant proffered freedom dues on a scale that few expected to receive by the mid-eighteenth century.22 Other circumstances were also at work, creating a bonanza for regimental canvassers among this portion of society. Special mention must be made of servant enlistees who used military service to escape a state of unjust enslavement. They, unlike people who had signed legitimate contracts or were banished felons, had been spirited away from home by unscrupulous sea captains and sold to willing buyers all along the Atlantic coast. For “Barbadozed” youth, the appearance of a recruiting party provided a means to ameliorate their situation. Enlistment was the surest way to avoid the long arm of both their masters and zealous magistrates who penalized fugitives by extending indenture lengths regardless of circumstances.23

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The themes of migration and settlement are firmly entwined in English Atlantic history. They appear as well in the 60th Regiment’s story since its members expected to be discharged in the colonies after the Seven Years’ War. This is precisely why many of the thousand troops raised in the Holy Roman Empire had initially taken the king’s shilling. Provincial volunteers, similarly, joined the colours with promises of at least a 200 acre land grant following the triumph of British arms.24 King George III’s proclamation of 7 October 1763 went further, providing field officers with grants of 5,000 acres; captains 3,000 acres; subalterns and staff 2,000 acres; ncos and drummers 200 acres; and all sentinels 50 acres apiece, the minimum required to support a family.25 Seven years separated discrete metropolitan land grant programs colloquially termed “the king’s reward.” The War Office’s inaugural 1756 measure had been designed to facilitate recruitment into the British land forces already stationed in the New World. This initiative guaranteed volunteers or their legal heirs rights to 200 acres of land quitrent free for ten years either in New York, New Hampshire, or Nova Scotia at war’s end.26 Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, apparently on his own authority as Major-General Edward Braddock’s successor, increased this bounty to 300 acres for New Englanders inducted into the line since he was vying for men with provincial forces already entitled to the basic allowance. Consequently, 1,484 Royal Americans who had volunteered between July and November 1756 became beneficiaries of imperial largess. A smaller number of sentinels later drafted into the 60th Foot from two broken colonial corps, the 50th and 51st Regiments, expected the bonus acreage because of the special promise made to them by William Shirley.27 A more ambitious plan for the benefit of all North American troops was formulated soon after Quebec’s conquest. This measure proved advantageous to both colonists who had enlisted in the regulars after 15 November 1756, when land-grant inducements were no longer offered to volunteers, and the thousands of redcoats dispatched overseas during the course of the conflict. Discharged servicemen, in particular, became the focus of domestic concern because the mother country feared inundation by unemployed returnees if nothing was done to make them stakeholders in the expanded empire. Since officials believed that veterans could “get their Livelyhood in America by working easier than they can at home,” Whitehall intervened to prevent them becoming either societal threats or burdens. Even prospective Chelsea out-pensioners, charity cases mustered out of the line on account of wounds or long service with a yearly stipend of £7.12.6, were advised to

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remain behind in the New World, where living standards and wage scales were considered exceptional.28 The 7 October 1763 Royal Proclamation, establishing new governments in Quebec, Florida, and Grenada, also contained provisions for a broader land-allocation scheme. The pertinent decree, framed to spur habitation of undeveloped regions, authorized free distribution of vacant Crown land to officers and men on a graduated scale according to rank. Those already entitled to the 1756 grants of 200 or 300 acres also received this additional benefaction. Such grants were exempt from normal taxation for a decade but had to be fully occupied within that time to prevent escheat to the government. Possession was demonstrated through completion of settlement duties, including maintenance of three cattle for every fifty acres patented on marginal ground, drainage of three acres for every fifty acres of marsh, or planting of three acres for every fifty acres of cultivable soil. Speculation was deterred by giving owners only three years from the date of the grant to begin these improvements.29 Not all service personnel joined the frontier land rush. Those discharged between the years 1758 and 1762 with an established residence, and men with no interest in farming whatsoever, perceived little benefit in relocating to colonial frontiers. Nevertheless, military rights could be sold, a frequent practice after 1766, when attorneys began submitting mass petitions to New York’s governor, Henry Moore. Unimproved tracts in the Lake Champlain basin could be purchased for as little as fourteen pence per acre, furnishing sentinels with a minimum bonus of between £3 and £21 York currency as their entitlements warranted. Some properties, however, sold for up to twenty shillings an acre, inflating bounty values to much higher sums.30 Such windfalls were a godsend to the disbanded troops who eked out a living in the major port cities. Wartime service had familiarized these men with many of the occupations that they now pursued: mariner, labourer, carman, stevedore, carpenter, bricklayer, baker, tailor, and various other vocations. Former soldiers with the ability to read and write applied these talents to best advantage as clerks, while some with modest financial resources became storekeepers or innholders.31 While former service personnel established new homes throughout British North America, a large number of redcoats chose New York as their residence since it offered the best settlement possibilities nearest army discharge points and was already a familiar haunt for men accustomed to duty along the watersheds of the Hudson and St Lawrence Rivers.32 The property-acquisition process, moreover, was accelerated because soldiers did not have to extinguish Aboriginal rights to the land that they solicited, as prewar applicants had been required to do.

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Rather, veterans identified desirable locations and then petitioned the governor directly for a deed to the site. Official consent was necessary before surveyors could run rudimentary lines between holdings and record coordinates in field books. This vital information was used to create plats of each tract, which were submitted to the provincial authorities for final approval. Military claimants could receive lot titles in as little as thirteen months and were required to pay surveying expenses but not the other attendant fees normally charged to civilians.33 Veterans accompanied provincial surveyors northward from Albany to their prospective holdings during the spring of 1764. Several considerations including soil quality, presence of meadows, amount of cleared ground, water supply, and proximity to local garrisons influenced lot selections. Satellite communities, sanctioned by army headquarters because of their utility to the troops, already existed around key British posts and attracted those wanting to establish farms in the area. Choice locations in the vicinity around Fort Edward or Crown Point were the first to be settled.34 Others received grants on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain between Otter Creek and Onion River, where the area’s natural fecundity and mild climate enticed veterans to a region aptly labelled the Soldiers’ Patent by eighteenth-century cartographers.35 Military service provided more than just viable homesteading locations. It had also acculturated troops to the frontier environment, in which many chose to remain. Vital skills such as effective hunting and fishing techniques and knowledge of where to find edible forest flora and of how to produce health preservatives, like maple syrup and spruce beer, had been acquired by the rank and file during the war.36 Furthermore, years spent constructing encampments, blockhouses, and supply depots trained men in how to build their own modest cabins and barns after expeditiously clearing the land.37 Other agrarian talents developed from the endless cycle of fatigue duties performed by all infantrymen. At some point in their military careers, troops toiled in large garrison gardens and participated in the grass guard, which tended to the needs of the king’s livestock. Such experiences contributed to the transformation of former servicemen into proficient subsistence farmers, as one rare partial inventory of an nco’s Charlotte County estate suggests. Within a few years of settlement, Sergeant Moses Campbell had developed his property into a financial asset worth £653 York currency, consisting of a furnished home for ten people, a barn, livestock, agricultural implements, and twenty acres of fenced land under cultivation.38 Regimental affiliations endured beyond demobilization, providing a critical support network for disbanded troops as they adjusted to civilian life. Messmates usually applied for land grants adjacent to one

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another “for the Convenience of Mutual Assistance” since experience taught that many hands would be needed to wrest a living from the wilderness. Collaborative efforts among the veterans were crucial during early years of settlement, when natural reverses or crop failures could jeopardize the lives of all involved.39 Permanent British garrisons, likewise, provided an appropriate venue, offering a safe haven in times of unrest, access to government provisions in lean years, milling equipment appropriate for civilian use, and a ready market for surplus produce. Satellite developments quickly formed near key installations, encouraged in part by commanders still concerned about the welfare of their discharged legionnaires.40 Bonds forged between officers and men during wartime proved advantageous for both parties in the post-Treaty of Paris world. Gentlemen relegated to the half-pay list preferred veterans as tenants for their New World estates. This was a cautious first step into civilian life for some other ranks who benefited from the 1760s land glut and from the increased number of proprietors anxious to settle their new properties with people. Since the demand for tenants far outstripped immediate supply, lease agreements were negotiated on very liberal terms, allowing renters and their families perpetual occupation, affordable payments, mill access, and the right to profit from any improvements made.41 Major Philip Skene reported to metropolitan authorities that it was his practice to “give provisions and cattle &c. to all discharged soldiers that settle: 270 men discharged at the Havana came with me to New York, the most of them waits my return to settle them.” Such incentives brought former sentinels onto the tracts of regimental superiors anxious to people their new country seats with industrious inhabitants.42 Ambitious officers with a thirst for property did not let the Royal Proclamation’s stipulations limit dreams of acquiring more acreage in other locales. Having established primary residences in more genteel settings, they soon formed speculative real estate consortiums to exploit the vacant lands of Nova Scotia. This, too, was an area well trodden by army commanders who had served in the expeditions against Louisbourg and then suppressed French partisans along the St John’s River Valley. Two foreign Protestant officers, Captain Samuel Holland and Lieutenant Joseph F.W. DesBarres, who were concurrently employed by London officials to reconnoiter King George III’s new possessions, championed the 60th Regiment’s involvement in these development schemes.43 Samuel Holland recognized a judicious opportunity when he became a member of the St John’s River Society, chartered by members of the Montreal garrison in 1764. Two other Royal Americans, Captain

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Beamsley Glasier and Rev. John Ogilvie, joined Captain Thomas Falconer of the 44th Regiment as pivotal players in this association determined to engross 600,000 acres of Nova Scotian land. Falconer served as president for the committee of sixty investors, Ogilvie became treasurer, and Glasier officiated as the resident manager charged with overseeing actual settlement until recalled to active duty in 1767.44 Their plan was quite simple. Each proprietor would pay an initial subscription of £30 plus a £15 yearly renewal fee to offset the costs of locating and improving the grants. Returns would accrue to shareholders as the price of cultivated lands increased and dividends were garnered from the sale of cured fish, potash, and lumber across the North Atlantic world. Anticipated recompense was so great that residents from as far away as Montreal, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia became involved, alongside colonial officials such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts Bay and Charles Morris of Halifax. Additional Royal American participants included Colonel Frederick Haldimand, Captain Daniel Claus, Lieutenant John Nordberg, and Lieutenant Daniel Wriesberg.45 This premiere Nova Scotian investment project commenced in 1765 when Glasier ascended the St John’s River in the early spring. Strong ties to the provincial government in Halifax assured acceptance of his land application as well as preferential treatment in the awarding of five desirable townships, subsequently named Burton, Conway, Gage, New-Town, and Sunbury in honour of senior associates. Michael Francklin, later lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, joined the partnership, covered initial patent expenses, and defended the group’s interests against rival company agents competing for waterfront property.46 Prospective residents were lured to the area by the construction of a dam at the Great Rapids along the Nashwaak River, the arrival of milling equipment and oxen from Boston, and easy financial terms offered to those willing to buy or rent land from the manager. Plans were even afoot to speed development by importing families from Ireland, New England, Canso Bay, and Quebec.47 Despite an auspicious beginning, fissures soon appeared when the army transferred more than half of the original associates out of North America as part of a rotation scheme designed to keep the line regiments fit for service. Failure by absentee members to appoint deputies with powers of attorney before embarkation also complicated the decision-making process when important management issues had to be resolved promptly. Moreover, a premature financial crisis, caused by nonpayment of annual dues, broke the consortium’s cohesion when bills of exchange signed by Captain Beamsley Glasier for necessary expenses were returned unpaid.48 The partnership dissolved shortly

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thereafter, with investors assuming personal responsibility for lot improvement. Established mills were held in common another sixteen years prior to becoming the exclusive property of titleholders in the township where they stood.49 The problems associated with large syndicates were avoided by other officers of the 60th Regiment also keen to acquire Nova Scotian lands. Lieutenant Joseph F.W. DesBarres, a Royal American surveyor and cartographer, best represented the cadre who combined professional and personal interests to amass enormous estates. In this instance, income and practical knowledge came through the auspices of the Admiralty Office, which employed DesBarres to produce detailed charts of the coastline from the Gulf of St Lawrence southward past Manhattan. After two decades of labour, he produced his Atlantic Neptune, which served the needs of the seafaring community until the latter half of the nineteenth century.50 DesBarres built a home and headquarters complex at his small farm in Falmouth township to serve as a nerve centre for his extensive operations. It did not take the hydrographer long to add to his initial 4,135 acre property. Two grants during the mid-1760s ultimately netted him a further 27,000 acres. The largest, a 20,000–acre tract situated on the northeastern coast near Bay Verte, called Tatamagouche Manor, was conveyed by the Board of Trade in 1764. The remaining 7,000 acre parcel at Menaudie in Cumberland County was the lion’s share of a larger 8,000 acre favour acquired by DesBarres and five other battalion confreres from Halifax officials in the spring of 1765. Seventeen families eventually settled this Bay of Fundy estate, known as Elysian Fields, and came under DesBarres’s wing following his acquisition of majority interest from disinterested partners. The subaltern purchased more than 50,000 additional acres over time when other military gentlemen disposed of their bounties.51 Land acquisition was the easiest piece of the plantation-development puzzle. Since success was contingent on the number of tenants engaged to cultivate manor lands, the lieutenant found a providential solution to the dearth of European or colonial immigrants by encouraging some local families to tend his extensive tracts. Acadian refugees, who were regarded as legal subjects provided they took the oath of allegiance, made a superlative workforce because they knew how to protect fertile loam from high Fundy tides.52 Common natal ties with prewar Montbéliard immigrants from the French-Swiss border influenced some families to take up residence on the Tatamagouche grant. Yorkshire and Lowland Scots farmers, escaping from high rents charged by improving squires in the early 1770s, also found new homes in Nova Scotia by reestablishing themselves on the subaltern’s holdings at negligible cost to the proprietor.53

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Prince Edward Island was the last area in the Maritime region to attract the attention of entrepreneurs from the 60th Regiment. London administrators had to apply Solomonic wisdom when dividing Halifax’s largest offshore dependency among applicants who included powerful political figures, military officers, and London merchants. John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, then First Lord of the Admiralty, became the pivotal player. His proposal to establish feudal baronies was supported by underlings hoping to lease these 40,000 acre properties for the nominal sum of £20 per year. Each of these major holdings, or Hundreds, would contain twenty manors further subdivided into 2,000 acre plots for occupants. Egmont pragmatically co-opted rival claimants by offering them stations as capital tenants or manor-holders, which proved acceptable to all parties except the Board of Trade. Instead, the imperial government divided the island into sixty-seven lots of 20,000 acres each, granting them to individual syndicates upon the condition that 100 Protestants be settled in each township within a decade. Seven Royal Americans, including MajorGeneral James Murray and Captains Thomas Bassett, Samuel Holland, William Ridge, and James Stevenson, together with Lieutenants Francis and Samuel Mackay, became proprietors when titles were allocated on 23 July 1767.54 Redcoats were not only migrants and settlers; they also participated eagerly in the Atlantic economy, even while on active duty. The most ambitious entrepreneur was the Royal Americans’ founder, Colonel James Prevost, who joined venture capital raised among foreign Protestant subordinates to the interests of a Huguenot commercial network. In 1757 he spent more than £10,000 on three South Carolina plantations, producing rice and indigo for export. Speculation in these markets was timely because staple prices rose during wartime, and both military and civilian partners were able to profit from the influence of major shareholders garrisoned in Charles Town when the enterprise was launched.55 The Seven Years’ War opened more novel investment fields for those anxious to increase their wealth. James Prevost once again was at the forefront, combining military service in New York with emerging economic opportunities there. From this bustling port, containing the most effective privateering fleet in British North America, a twenty-gun corsair, called the Colonel Prevost, took to the high seas in 1758 and captured almost £30,000 worth of prizes that year. Although complete lists of shareholders are rare, the Royal American officer did enjoy a business relationship with Joseph Haynes, one of the vessel’s principal underwriters. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that Prevost also speculated in licensed piracy with a ship named in his honour.56 The 1760 loss of French suzerainty over the northwestern interior allowed Royal American commercial networks to enter the region and

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generate substantial returns from the £100,000 fur trade plum. Major Walter Rutherfurd was ideally situated to exploit this opportunity after redcoated occupation troops established garrisons throughout the pays d’en haut. His family fortune, contacts with military administrators, and practical knowledge of the hinterland gained through regimental service all coalesced to further his ends. With little difficulty, Rutherfurd formed a consortium of like-minded adventurers with close ties to the military, including Lieutenant-Colonel John Bradstreet, Captain John Duncan, Lieutenant George Coventry, Alexander Coventry, Peter Van Brugh Livingston, James Syme, and John Porteous.57 Rutherfurd’s scheme to monopolize the strategic Niagara portage for his own benefit was visionary owing largely to his understanding of army logistics, topography of the Great Lakes watershed, and equitable relations with military superiors. Both he and John Duncan had first visited Niagara’s environs in 1759 as members of Brigadier-General John Prideaux’s expeditionary force, which captured the strategic French garrison. A year later, they accompanied the western army during its treacherous run down the St Lawrence River toward Montreal; Rutherfurd had been promoted to brevet major of the massed grenadier formation as a sign of Major-General Jeffery Amherst’s countenance prior to this last triumphant campaign.58 Within a few months of tendering his resignation in 1761, the former Royal American officer secured the commander-in-chief’s blessing to establish a settlement of 500 families in proximity to Fort Niagara. This entrepôt was intended to support the garrison, provide a workforce to transship goods between Lakes Ontario and Erie, and more important, provide a secure base for the storage of company wares. Headquarters sanctioned this enterprise because of its perceived benefit to the army before forwarding his submission to Whitehall for final approval.59 Events moved smoothly at first. The concern’s chief Western agent, James Sterling, established a residence at Detroit, leaving assistants behind at Niagara to construct a storehouse at the upper landing for the protection of company property. By the end of 1761, he reported that trading had been brisk with good returns. Diversified marketing targeted not only Amerindian villagers, but also British occupation forces and the French civilian community, as the Atlantic economy consolidated its hold over the continental interior. Such items as blankets, wampum, shirts, garters, ribbon, ornamental silver, scalping knives, and animal traps sold briskly to Aboriginal customers. Whites purchased surplus army provisions, especially salt pork, in addition to alcohol, spermaceti candles, condiments, Delft ware, china, and other overseas commodities.60 Preferential use of the Niagara crossing by the Rutherfurd consortium did have its detractors. At the forefront were the Chenussio Senecas,

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who jealously guarded this strategic passage, expecting payment for the conveyance of any goods around the falls. They remained uneasy, despite the promise of recompense for any lands utilized by the merchants, and expressed their concern through Sir William Johnson.61 An influential lobby of Albany peddlers also voiced discontent at what they perceived as undue control over access to their own trading facilities at Fort Niagara. They claimed that agents for the rival partnership intercepted potential customers at their advanced storehouse above the falls while asserting sole right to traffic there. Exclusive possession of this vantage point threatened competitors with bankruptcy because few villagers would venture further east to the main garrison, where the Albany traders bartered for furs.62 Much of the consortium’s early success was due to Rutherfurd’s influence over senior army officials and established relationships with Royal American comrades managing scattered posts throughout the Western theatre. Despite the vociferous protests of opponents, Amherst gave the New York-based syndicate another full year of trade by directing remonstrances to imperial administrators instead of immediately terminating operations. Even when Whitehall ordered the destruction of the forward magazine, army headquarters merely required the partners to vacate the new facility pending final word from the Privy Council.63 Battalion officers, too, abetted the company’s activities by winking at the occasional use of their men to labour on private building projects, guard valuable merchandise, or transport company wares between posts. This last concession was especially important when a season’s worth of peltry had to be moved down the Great Lakes to Albany for disposal. Other traders were required to pay high prices to convey their freight; Rutherfurd’s packs and merchandise, by contrast, travelled gratis through northwestern waterways aboard military vessels.64 In 1762 military nepotism once again extended its helpful hand after rum sales to Amerindians were banned and large existing stockpiles impounded to prevent further distribution.65 Such a proscription dealt a serious blow to the various trading houses that relied on this article for its portability, profitability, and perpetual consumer demand. Having a post commander or his subordinates in one’s pocket was an effectual means of evading the embargo. Special military passes, arranged by Sterling at Detroit, allowed employees to supply alcohol for the consumption of Europeans only, which then could be surreptitiously redirected to Amerindian customers.66 If staff were caught forwarding spirits against orders, subalterns with the 60th Regiment exonerated those employed by the New York concern when they appeared before military tribunals.67 Further advantages also accrued to the enterprise because of its founder’s past service with the Royal Americans. Erstwhile comrades

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took it upon themselves to warehouse expensive company property in their own quarters while managing business affairs in the absence of accredited representatives.68 Even officers at the remotest detachments abetted the Rutherfurd initiative by collecting arrears from traders who had acquired items on account but absconded into the wilderness to avoid repayment. The New York partnership had one of the most effective recovery systems in the lawless Northwest. Soldiers, when required, confiscated fur bales belonging to debtors or their associates and marked them with the Rutherfurd blazon as a means of repayment.69 Post commanders also adjusted mandatory transit charges in compliance with the wishes of company agents. Dispensations of this nature were curried with presents of pickled oysters, anchovies, and fine wine to grace the officers’ mess or with gifts of Native curiosities to important individuals, garnering “favours that gold cannot purchase.”70 Regimental gentry also supplemented their own wages by dabbling in the fur traffic. Isolated commanders were ideally placed to conduct business with very little effort or capital expense. Desirable wares could be obtained on credit from merchants at the larger bases and then bartered for furs when tribal members appeared at the remoter outposts to hold council. Moreover, since garrison principals were sources of government largess and often enjoyed equitable relations with local Amerindian communities through marriage, the groundwork was laid for the establishment of profitable winter stores. Ensigns Robert Holmes and Edward Jenkins were two such ambitious Royal Americans who mixed business with active duty. Trade at Holmes’s Miamis garrison had an estimated annual value of 80,000 livres, while commerce at Jenkins’s charge, Fort Ouiatenon, was estimated at 60,000 livres.71 Officers without the time or inclination to participate directly in commerce could back enterprises begun by acquaintances. Frederick von Hambach, a foreign Protestant volunteer with the Royal Americans, relied on the patronage of Colonel Henry Bouquet to ensure the viability of his fur trading career. The discharged veteran first obtained £3,000 worth of goods on credit through his superior’s recommendation.72 Army-controlled communication routes were then utilized to ship the merchandise expeditiously from Philadelphia, reaching the upcountry before competitors’ goods. Von Hambach relied continually on the colonel’s influence to protect him from censure when he conducted business outside fort precincts against army orders.73 Military logistical support posed economic opportunities for Royal Americans not inclined to the fur trade. In 1764 Lieutenant Francis Pfister, who settled at the western end of the Niagara portage after reduction to half-pay, quickly put his expertise and personal contacts to advantageous use. All the stars were in perfect alignment when he

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became beneficiary of a government contract to transport army supplies and boats around the falls for an annual stipend of £100. As part of the agreement, all of the king’s wagons and draught animals at Fort Niagara were relinquished to the veteran, allowing him to earn much more income by charging traders a minimum of £10 York currency for every load carried by his teams.74 Pfister, on his own volition, also constructed a sawmill above the falls to provide 60th garrisons with the lumber needed to maintain their barracks, storehouses, and vessels. This endeavour increased the entrepreneur’s yearly income by several hundred pounds. Both profitable concerns were retained even after the subaltern returned to active duty in 1767.75 The military’s insatiable demand for salt provided Lieutenant Dietrich Brehm, an auxiliary engineer, who was one of the first British officers to reconnoiter the Great Lakes basin, with another opportunity for lucrative enterprise. During his thorough 1760 survey, Brehm recognized tremendous economic potential at the Detroit narrows after noting the presence of saline springs and adjacent wood supplies.76 This expensive preservative was essential for British installations when garrison livestock was slaughtered in the early winter months as pastures became bare.77 Since all supplies had to be imported along lengthy transportation routes, Brehm believed that he could enrich himself by provisioning the upper posts from local refining works to be built on the Rouge River. Although small distillation operations could be quite simply performed with iron kettles set over a roaring fire, the officer may have had more ambitious plans in mind. By the mideighteenth century, imposing production facilities had been established in Europe that utilized pumps, large boiling pans, and intricate graduation houses to concentrate the final yield. The lieutenant’s request for substantial land grants around two promising sites and an exclusive contract to furnish the king’s men from Fort Pitt to La Baye with salt presaged large-scale development.78 Lest one think that commerce was a privilege restricted to officer elites, military records suggest that even the lowly rank and file engaged in trade whenever the opportunity presented itself. Amerindians made willing partners. Rum, clothing, and ammunition were all important commodities bartered with Natives, who provided food or furs in return. Even on hazardous advances into enemy territory, troops had to be admonished about “purchasing or Exchanging anything whatsoever” with any of the tribesmen they encountered. Clearly, trade followed the flag and was sometimes even conducted by those standard bearers of empire as they marched through a combat zone.79 The three key themes of the Atlantic experience – migration, settlement, and trade – permeate the story of the 60th (Royal American)

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Regiment of Foot. Founded by a Swiss soldier of fortune, the corps saw its muster rolls filled by a variety of wayfarers who used enlistment either as a relocation mechanism or as a way to improve their station in the New World. Besides tangible rewards like land grants, years with the colours acclimated both officers and men to frontier environments, in which many chose to spend the rest of their days. Common bonds forged during wartime, moreover, survived the peace, with commanders taking a paternal interest in the welfare of discharged company personnel who had banded together in pioneer settlements. Such military patronage networks also provided a foundation on which successful commercial enterprises could be built as redcoats from all ranks sought to profit from trade wherever they encamped. The diverse activities of Royal American servicemen indicate that their pursuits were not limited solely to the geo-political sphere of Mar’s Field as they forged an exemplary Atlantic microcosm in times of both war and peace.

notes 1 Brief portions of this chapter were originally published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 129 (July 2005): 253, 264–6, reprinted with permission. 2 Edward G. Williams, “The Prevosts of the Royal Americans,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 56 (1973): 1–38 at 22–37; Francios-Alexandre-Frederic, Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America, The Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada in the Years 1795, 1796 and 1797, With an Authentic Account of Lower Canada, trans. Henri Neuman (London, 1799), vol. 2, 220–3. 3 Quotation from David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, “Introduction,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500– 1800, 1–7 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1. 4 Alexander V. Campbell, “The Royal American Regiment, 1755–1772: An Atlantic Community” (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2003), 7–61; Lewis Butler and Sir Stewart Hare, The Annals of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (London: Smith Elder and Company, 1913–32), vol. 1, 1–201. 5 John Yorke to Lord Hardwicke, 28 October 1755, Additional Manuscripts (hereafter Add. MSS) 35,374, 125–6, British Library (hereafter bl), London; Sir Thomas Robinson to Maj. [James] Prevost, 28 October 1755, Loudoun Papers (hereafter lo) 665, Henry E. Huntington Library (hereafter heh), San Marino, California; Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 61–3.

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6 “Colonel Prevost’s Account from 1 October 1755 to 28 February 1756,” War Office (hereafter wo), class 34, piece 46 B, 18–19, The National Archives (hereafter tna), Kew, Richmond, Surrey; “Etat des Officers Suisses et Allemands engagez en Hollande par Mssr. Prevost,” n.d., Cumberland Papers, box 46, item 126, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Berkshire, England. 7 Williams, “Prevosts,” 20–1; “Bouquet, Henry,” in American National Biography (hereafter anb), vol. 3, 249–50; “Claus, Christian Daniel,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography (hereafter dcb), vol. 4, 154–5; “Grass, Michael,” in dcb, vol. 5, 377–8; “Gugy, Conrad,” in dcb, vol. 4, 316–7; “Haldimand, Sir Frederick,” in dcb, vol. 5, 887–902. 8 “Subsistence Accounts,” n.d., wo 34/99/163, tna; “A State of the Cash of the 62d or Royal American Regiment to Christmas, 1756,” n.d., lo 2521, heh; Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755– 1763 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 318. 9 English and Irish volunteers: Lt. George Brereton to the Earl of Loudoun, 8 April 1756, lo 1026, heh; “Return of Discharged Men,” 21 March 1757, lo 3117, heh; Scottish Recruits: “Return of the Strength of the 42d, Royal American, and General Otway’s Regiments Embarked at Grenock,” 8 June 1756, lo 2415, heh; David Hepburn to Loudoun, 10 November 1757, lo 4802, heh; German Veterans: “General Memorandums,” 25–8 February 1756, Loudoun Notebooks, vol. 8, 41–4, Huntington Manuscripts (hereafter hm) 1717, heh. 10 John Clevland to the Duke of Newcastle, 19 April 1756, Add. MSS 32,864, 343, bl; Anon., An Impartial History of the Late Glorious War (Manchester, 1764), 17. 11 Maj-Gen. Robert Napier to the Earl of Loudoun, 8 May 1756, lo 1136, heh; “HRH,” n.d., and “Memorandum,” 11 May 1756, Loudoun Notebooks, vol. 9, 55, and vol. 10, 15, hm 1717, heh. 12 Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 1–112; Aaron S. Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 15–80; A. Gregg Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1–53, 95–113; Farley Grubb, “The Market Structure of Shipping German Immigrants to Colonial America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter pmhb) 111 (1987): 27–48 at 45–7. 13 “Petition of Colonel James Prevost,” n.d., Add. MSS 32,901, 522, bl; Alexander V. Campbell, “A ‘Nursery for Soldiers to the Whole World’: Colonel James Prevost and the Foreign Protestant Military Migration of the MidEighteenth Century,” pmhb 129 (2005): 253–81. 14 “A List of Recruits under Command of Captain Herbert B[a]r[on] de Munster Embark’d ye 4th of June Near Hamburg and Arrived ye 27th of August at New York, 1756” (hereafter Munster’s List), 27 August 1756, lo 1607, heh.

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15 Sir Joseph Yorke to Maj-Gen. Robert Napier, 23 March 1756, lo 959, heh; George Cressener to the Earl of Holdernesse, 25 March 1756, State Papers, class 81, piece 128, tna; “Evidence of Corporal Henry Dorman,” 20 August 1757, wo 71/66/57–8, tna. 16 “Lieutenant [John] Schlosser’s Advertisement for Recruits,” 2 July 1756, Timothy Horsfield Paper (hereafter thp), American Philosophical Society (hereafter aps), Philadelphia; “Munster’s List,” 27 August 1756, lo 1607, heh. I am grateful to Helmut Radday of the Oberharzer Berwerksmuseum for information about Clausthal’s economic problems in the mid-1750s; personal communication with author, 4 May 2000. 17 “Extraits des Différentes Lettres écrites au Col. Prevost au sujet des Recrues à faire en Allemagne,” n.d., lo 2575, heh: “un nombre de leurs Compatriotes en Amérique, et font très disposés à les y aller joindre,” my translation. See also Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 9–17, 86, 118–28; Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys, 18–35; Grubb, “Market Structure,” 45. 18 Quotation from Col. John Stanwix to the Earl of Loudoun, 6 August 1756, lo 1425, heh; “Additional Instructions to Colonel Prevost Relating to his Bringing Over Planters From Germany,” 23 April 1756, wo 34/76/20–1, tna; Maj. John Young to Loudoun, 2 September 1756, lo 1681, heh; Bennett Cuthbertson, A System for the Compleat Interior Management and Oeconomy of a Battalion of Infantry (Dublin, 1768), 14. 19 “Munster’s List,” 27 August 1756, lo 1607, heh; “General Orders of the Earl of Loudoun, 7 May 1757–28 September 1757” (entry of 17 May 1757), lo 3576, heh; “Payments to Colonel Prevost on Account of Clothing, Contingencies &c.,” 5 March 1761, lo 5859, heh. 20 Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 67–92, 128–36; Farley Grubb, “Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlantic Passage: Eighteenth-Century German Immigration to Pennsylvania,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987): 565–85; Lt. [Thomas] Webb, A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army (Philadelphia, 1759), 51. 21 Maj. John Rutherfurd to [Lt-Gov. Horatio Sharpe], 12 September 1756, Frank M. Etting Collection, Autographs, Colonial Wars, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter hsp), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; [?] Turner to Messrs Wolffinder and Birchinsha, September 1756, and Turner to Jacob Bosanquet, September 1756, Allen and Turner Letterbook, Library Company Collection, hsp; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 150–8. 22 Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, eds, The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 87–97; Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 106–8, 134; William Eddis, Letters from America, ed. Aubrey C. Land, (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1969), 35–8; Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and

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“Hutchinson, Thomas,” in anb, vol. 11, 597–600; “Morris, Charles,” in dcb, vol. 4, 559–63. Capt. Beasmley Glasier to John Fenton, 1 March 1765, and Michael Francklin to Glasier, 22 July 1765, sjrs, items 5 and 12, Masshs; Charles Morris, Jr, to Nathaniel Rogers, n.d., sjrs, item 30, Masshs; Raymond, ed., “prsjr,” 303–6. Capt. Beamsley Glasier to Nathaniel Rogers, 25 August and 10 November 1765, 12 May and 30 June 1766, sjrs, items 17, 27, 34, and 36, Masshs; Charles Morris, Jr, to Rogers, n.d., sjrs, item 30, Masshs. “Protested Bill of Exchange for £250,” 14 January 1766, sjrs, item 26, Masshs; Capt. Beamsley Glasier to Nathaniel Rogers, 13 February 1766, and “Minutes of the Meeting of New York Members of the St. John’s River Society,” 3 June 1766, sjrs, items 31 and 35, Masshs; John W. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 274–7. James Porteous to Nathaniel Rogers, 24 August 1767, sjrs, item 58, Masshs; “Memorial of John Porteous,” 26 June 1783, in Morse, ed., Canadian Collection 6 (1948–49): 76–7; Raymond, ed., “prsjr,” 339–49. Geraint N.D. Evans, Uncommon Obdurate: The Several Public Careers of J.F.W. DesBarres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 11–26; Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966–69), vol. 1, 106–8. “The Plaintiff’s Case,” [1808], and “Estates and Property, Seized by Mr. Sparrow in Nova Scotia,” n.d., DesBarres Papers (hereafter dp), Manuscript Group (hereafter mg) 23, ser. 7, items 8 and 21, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac), Ottawa; Evans, Uncommon Obdurate, 27–32. Capt. Beamsley Glasier to the St John’s River Committee at Montreal, 14 December 1764, in Raymond, ed., “prsjr,” 313; “Acquisition, Improvements & Settlement of Menaudie,” n.d., and “Estimate of Estates Belonging to Lieutenant-Governor Desbarres,” n.d, dp, mg 23, ser. 5, vol. 17, 3187–99, and ser. 7, item 23, lac. “Estates and Property, Seized by Mr. Sparrow in Nova Scotia,” n.d., dp, mg 23, ser. 7, item 21, lac; Jean-Marc Debard, “The Family Origins of Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres: A Riddle Finally Solved,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 14 (1994): 108–22; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), 372–90, 401–19; John Robinson and Thomas Rispin, A Journey through Nova Scotia (York, 1774), 3. Jack M. Bumsted, Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 15–26; Andrew Hill Clark, Three Centuries and the Island: A Historical Geography of Settlement and Agriculture in Prince Edward Island, Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), 42–8, 264–8; John Purceval, Earl of Egmont, The Memorial of John Earl of Egmont … [for] a Grant of the Whole Island of Saint John’s in the Gulph of Saint Laurence (London, 1764), 1–32.

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55 Gov. William H. Lyttelton to Maj-Gen. James Abercromby, 16 May 1758, Abercromby Papers, item 259, heh; “Letter of Attorney: Joseph and Henry Guinand to Colonel James Prevost and Colonel Henry Bouquet,” 11 July 1760, Add. MSS 21,687, 26–8, bl; Col. Henry Bouquet to Maj-Gen. Robert Monckton, 12 June 1761, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 545; Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100–10; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 190–208, 227–62. 56 Boston News Letter, 6 July 1758, 2; Joseph Haynes to Col. Henry Bouquet, 23 January 1761, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 258; James G. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (Upper Saddle River, nj: Gregg Press, 1970), 143, 156–9, 250–1, 272, 277; Stuyvesant Fish, The New York Privateers, 1756–1763 (New York: George Grady Press, 1945), 59. 57 Walter Rutherfurd to Maj-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 28 April 1761, wo 34/21/ 147, tna; Sir William Johnson to Capt. Daniel Claus, 20 May 1761, in James Sullivan et al., eds, The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany, ny: University of the State of New York, 1921–65) (hereafter swjp), vol. 10, 270; “Extract of a Letter to Governor Murray from Albany,” 10 August 1761, Add. MSS 35,913, 151, bl. 58 “Petition of Major Walter Rutherfurd,” n.d., co 5/1071/153, tna; Brian L. Dunnigan, Siege-1759: The Campaign Against Niagara (Youngstown, ny: Old Fort Niagara Association, 1986), 25–30, 36. 59 Walter Rutherfurd to Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 9 April 1761, and “A Proclamation,” 10 April 1761, wo 34/74/155,162, tna; John Duncan to Amherst, 9 July 1762, wo 34/91/29, tna; Amherst to William Sharpe, 20 October 1762, wo 34/74/155–6, tna. 60 James Sterling to Messrs Rutherfurd and Livingston, 12 February 1762 and 25 January 1763, James Sterling Letterbook (hereafter jslb), wlcl; Sterling to John Duncan, 8 July 1761 and 26 August 1762, jslb, wlcl; Sterling to [Robert] Callbeck, 14 April 1762, and Sterling to James Syme, 14 April 1762, jslb, wlcl. 61 Sir William Johnson to Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 29 July 1761, in Sullivan et al., eds, swjp, vol. 10, 322; Maj. William Walters to Amherst, 20 June 1762, wo 34/22/40, tna; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1513–1765 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 238, 241; William J. Eccles, “The Fur Trade and Eighteenth-Century Imperialism,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 40 (1983): 341–62 at 358–9. 62 “Petition of Merchants of Albany to the Lords of Trade,” 25 January 1762, in O’Callaghan and Fernow, eds, nycd, vol. 7, 488–9; Sir William Johnson to Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 6 February 1762, in Sullivan et al., eds, swjp, vol. 3, 623. 63 “Report of the Lords of Trade on the Memorial of the Albany Merchants,” 3 June 1762, in O’Callaghan and Fernow, eds, nycd, vol. 7, 502–3; Lt-Gen.

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Jeffery Amherst to Maj. John Wilkins, 17 October 1762, wo 34/22/163, tna; Michael N. McConnell, Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), xv-31. James Sterling to John Duncan, 8 July 1761, 26 August and 2 October 1762, jslb, wlcl; Sterling to James Syme, 10 January 1762, jslb, wlcl; Henry Bostwick to James Beekman, 10 December 1764, in Philip L. White, ed., The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1956), vol. 2, 952–3; Franklin B. Hough, ed., Diary of the Siege of Detroit in the War with Pontiac: Also a Narrative of the Principal Events of the Siege by Major Robert Rogers, a Plan for Conducting Indian Affairs by Colonel Bradstreet, and Other Authentick Documents Never Before Printed (Albany, ny: J. Munsell, 1860), 144. Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst to Sir William Johnson, 16 January 1762, in Sullivan et al., eds, swjp, vol. 10, 354; Amherst to Col. Henry Bouquet, 7 June 1762, wo 34/41/58, tna. James Sterling to James Syme, n.d., and Sterling to John Duncan, 25 October 1762, jslb, wlcl; Capt. Donald Campbell to Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 21 April 1762, and Maj. Henry Gladwin to Amherst, 26 January 1763, wo 34/49/ 89, 147, tna. Maj. William Walters to Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, 15 May 1762, and “Minutes of a Garrison Court Martial,” 14 May 1762, wo 34/22/26, 28–9, tna. James Sterling to Capt. George Etherington, 31 May 1762, and Sterling to James Syme, [?] June 1762, jslb, wlcl. James Sterling to Lt. William Leslye, 3 June 1762, and Sterling to Lt. Edward Jenkins, 14 April 1763, jslb, wlcl; “Petition of English and French Traders at Detroit,” 24 July 1767, tgpas, vol. 67, wlcl. Quotation from James Sterling to John Duncan, 26 August 1762, jslb, wlcl; Sterling to Commodore Joshua Loring, 19 August 1762, and Sterling to Henry Van Schaack, 7 October 1762, jslb, wlcl. “Extract of a Letter to Governor Murray from Albany, 10 August 1761,” Add. MSS 35,913, 151, bl; James Sterling to Ens. Robert Holmes, 6 July 1762, and Sterling to Lt. Edward Jenkins, 14 April 1763, jslb, wlcl. Col. James Prevost to Richard Peters, 18 April 1758, Simon Gratz Manuscripts, “Colonial Wars,” case 4, box 8, hsp; Frederick von Hambach to Col. Henry Bouquet, 1 January 1761, and von Hambach to Bouquet, 22 March 1761, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 229, 362; Alexander Lunan to Bouquet, 7 March 1761, in ibid., 336. Frederick von Hambach to Col. Henry Bouquet, 13 February 1761, and von Hambach to Bouquet, 24 May 1761, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 294, 503; Capt. Donald Campbell to Bouquet, 21 May 1761, in ibid., 492. Maj-Gen. Thomas Gage to Col. John Bradstreet, 17 March 1766, tgpas, vol. 49, wlcl; Journal of John Lees of Quebec, Merchant, 8 (entry of 27 June 1768), mg 21, Add. MSS 28,605, lac.

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75 “Francis Phister,” 9 October 1767, Succession Books, (Series 1) General, 1764–71, wo 25/210, tna; Capt John Brown to Maj-Gen. Thomas Gage, 6 November 1768, tgpas, vol. 82, wlcl; Gage to Brown, 19 December 1768, Add. MSS 21,678, 122, bl. 76 Maj-Gen. Jeffery Amherst to Lt. Dietrich Brehm, 12 September 1760, and “Lieut. Brehm’s Report,” 21 February 1761, wo 34/50/191 and 34/49/22, tna; Brehm to Lt-Col. John Campbell, 3 November 1765, tgpas, vol. 45, wlcl. 77 Adam Hoops to Col. Henry Bouquet, 4 November 1760, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 100; Bouquet to Maj-Gen. Thomas Gage, 15 June 1764, tgpas, vol. 20, wlcl. 78 Capt. Donald Campbell to Col. Henry Bouquet, 11 December 1760, in Stevens et al., eds, bp, vol. 5, 172; Lt-Col. John Campbell to Maj-Gen. Thomas Gage, 31 October 1765, tgpas, vol. 45, wlcl; Robert P. Multhauf, Neptune’s Gift: A History of Common Salt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7, 27, 36–8, 49, 71–92. 79 Quotation from “Headquarters at the 15th Camp,” 24 October 1764, in Edward G. Williams, ed., The Orderly Book of Colonel Henry Bouquet’s Expedition against the Ohio Indians, 1764 (Pittsburgh: Privately printed, 1960), 37; “Camp at Wills’s Creek,” 23 May 1755, in Charles Hamilton, ed., Braddock’s Defeat: The Journal of Captain Robert Cholmley’s Batman; The Journal of a British Officer; Halkett’s Orderly Book (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 92; Lt-Gen. Jeffery Amherst to [?] Campbell, 28 November 1762, wo 34/93/232, tna.

12 In the King’s Service Provisioning and Quartering the British Army in the Old Northwest, 1760–731 michelle a. hamilton

In September 1761 Captain Donald Campbell, the commandant of Fort Detroit, reported to General Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of the British army in North America, that only one barrel of flour remained in the stores at the post. Campbell feared that because the Great Lakes system was seldom navigable after late November, he would not receive a supplemental shipment before April. Instead, he estimated that 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of flour could be obtained from French settlers at the post. The November 1761 return of provisions listed thirty-eight barrels of flour, thirty-nine of pork, one of rice, fifteen firkins of butter, twenty bushels of Indian corn, and sixteen bullocks.2 Yet given that the standard weekly ration equalled seven pounds of bread or flour, seven pounds of beef or three and half pounds of salt pork, a halfpound of rice, three pounds of peas, and six ounces of butter for one soldier, these supplies would not have fully sustained the eighty-nine men at Detroit over the winter.3 Even more troubling, facing the first winter of full occupation of the Old Northwest, Campbell needed to provision another seventy men stationed at the posts of Fort des Miamis, St Joseph, and Ouiatenon, although Forts Michilimackinac and Edward Augustus had ten months of food. Amherst vaguely responded to Campbell that he should take such measures as he thought prudent to prevent the garrison from being in “absolute want” during the winter.4 Such shortages continually occurred during the early British military occupation of the upper Great Lakes region because this geographical area was removed from the official system of transportation and supply

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for six to eight months of the year. Nor did the forts possess proper barracks to quarter troops. Consequently, the military based its survival on a network that incorporated the goods and skills of local Amerindian groups, French settlers, and colonial traders as well as the British logistical system, an arrangement that revealed the intertwined power relations of those in the king’s service. The necessity of subsistence and shelter affected the relationships between the British troops and their former enemies; the military treated the Amerindian and French inhabitants cautiously. After Pontiac’s uprising in 1763, however, the British increasingly distrusted their neighbours. As a result, the military gradually extracted itself from this network by strengthening its supply system, relying on provisions from British or colonial traders, and erecting barracks. This shift in strategy partially altered British relations with their neighbours in the upper Northwest. The army attempted to increase their dominance over French settlers, but the threat of Amerindian attack upon the military supply system meant that the British continued their cautious treatment of Native groups. Historians and archaeologists have addressed various aspects of the logistics of transportation, quartering, and provisioning needed to maintain the British military garrisons in the Old Northwest. Daniel Beattie and Brian Dunnigan provide the most complete description of British military logistics for Fort Michilimackinac, and several archaeologists have summarized the construction of barracks and storehouses at this fort based on documentary evidence. George S. May and Michael McConnell note both the inadequate transportation of provisions and food obtained from Amerindians, the latter also referred to at Fort Sandusky by Richard White, while Walter S. Dunn discusses the market that the military provided for Northwest traders.5 The most inclusive consideration of provisioning is detailed by Elizabeth Scott, who has examined transportation problems, the frequency of spoiled military provisions, and the resulting dependence on community resources between 1761 and 1781 at Michilimackinac, as McConnell does for the North and Southwest between 1758 and 1775. Other studies of the British occupation of the Old Northwest before Pontiac’s uprising confirm that early garrison subsistence relied on Amerindian and French resources as well as military supplies. Gary Shapiro argues that food obtained from hunting, fishing, and Amerindian trade at Michilimackinac has been underrepresented before 1763. Terrance Martin’s faunal analysis at Fort Ouiatenon between 1760 and 1763 demonstrates that the men at this post also relied on wild game and fowl, likely provided by the French and Amerindians.6 It is these models, which construct provisioning as a network of British, French, and Amerindian resources, that are most useful for this study.

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While Charles E. Cleland illuminates a change in subsistence between the French and the British occupations of Michilimackinac, and McConnell notes the declining amount of Native supplies after military reorganization in 1764, many scholars treat the period 1761 to 1781 as a constant.7 Scott does present changes in provisioning for nonmilitary residents at Michilimackinac. Evidence at the residence that contemporary archaeologists have designated as “House C,” which was owned by traders Ezekial Solomon and Gershom Levy, indicates an increasing reliance on domesticated animals and a decrease of wild game, birds, and fish between the years 1760 and 1770. While Scott partially attributes this change to the expanding wealth of the trading company, Solomon and Levy occupied this house only sporadically, and a British soldier lived there otherwise. Thus the subsistence pattern evidenced through archaeological remains may be more indicative of changes in military provisioning. Analysis of the archaeological remains of “House F” between the 1760s and 1770s may reveal a similar trend. In the 1760s the occupants of this residence consumed domesticated pork and a small amount of chicken, although wild foods, primarily beaver, moose, birds, and fish, were prominent. By the 1770s the occupants mainly relied on sheep, beef, pork, and fish. Scott designates this change a result of the transition from French to British occupants based on cultural food preferences, but Donald P. Heldman and Roger T. Grange suggest that a British officer lived there in the 1760s.8 It is necessary to understand this change in provisioning, as well as in quartering, because it affected the power relations between the British, French, and Amerindians in what Richard White calls the middle ground. As both a place and a process, the middle ground was characterized by cultural accommodation, misinterpretation, and creation of new meanings shared by both Natives and non-Natives. These groups relied on coercion rather than blatant force, as neither side could overpower the other.9 As White suggests, the middle ground existed at two different levels: the diplomatic and daily life.10 Although most historians focus on European-Native diplomacy or on the daily middle ground of the French and Amerindian populations who intermarried, and adapted, and syncretized religious beliefs, language, clothing, and food, the British military also interacted with these two groups on a daily basis. Scholars view the maintenance of the middle ground via intermarriage and the rituals of gift giving, speeches, and Amerindian councils. Yet a detailed consideration of the provisioning and quartering system as a network of local and military resources reveals that Amerindian and French political and economic power in the Old Northwest was also maintained because of the basic need of the British for subsistence

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and shelter and their problematic logistical system. While each group mutually benefited from this exchange of subsistence and shelter, it was often not a trade between two roughly equal powers. Instead, the British troops partially relied on their former enemies for survival out of expediency, and in contrast to French and Amerindian relationships, the British did not believe in a world of shared cultural meanings. In fact, the British fought to extract themselves from their interdependence and, after 1764, increased their logistical self-sufficiency. The constant threat of an Amerindian attack on their supply system meant that the British did continue to treat Native groups carefully, but the military hardened its attitude toward the French settlers. The 60th Royal American Regiment of Foot initiated occupation of the Great Lakes region in 1760. In November forces marched to Fort Detroit under Major Robert Rogers, and Lieutenant John Butler established troops at Fort des Miamis. From Detroit, troops were deployed to Michilimackinac under Captain Henry Balfour in September 1761. Leaving Lieutenant William Leslye in command, Balfour proceeded to Fort Edward Augustus on Green Bay in October and left Ensign James Gorrell in charge. Ensign Francis Schlosser and Lieutenant Edward Jenkins established troops at Fort St Joseph and Ouiatenon, respectively, in November. In August 1762 Lieutenant John Jamet proceeded from Michilimackinac to Sault Ste Marie. These officers followed Amherst’s prescriptive orders and those of General Thomas Gage, who replaced Amherst as commander in chief from 1763 to 1773. Amherst and Gage ordered minimal interaction between the troops and the Amerindians. Troops were to trade ammunition in exchange for provisions only if absolutely necessary. When traders proposed to supply the outposts, Amherst and Gage stated that they preferred to use the king’s provisions. In all expenses, commandants and commissaries were to economize. The inefficient military transportation and provisioning system made these orders impractical, and consequently the garrison commandants turned to local resources to help feed and house their troops. Posts at Niagara stored military provisions for the western district and distributed them to Detroit, which then supplied the interior posts. Unreliable transportation weakened this system and created shortages in provisioning. Michilimackinac, St Joseph, and Green Bay depended on lake travel, but even in May, there was a possibility of snow, and stormy weather returned in late September. Ice blocked navigation on Lakes Michigan and Huron from the end of October to late May, although small boats occasionally made successful trips in November or early April. On the water, these smaller craft were exposed to dangerous winds, especially on Lake Erie, where steep banks

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restricted shelter during storms. Inclement weather often sunk or drove ashore boats, resulting in the loss or water damage of goods. In addition, there was a lack of pitch, oakum, and tar, necessary for the repair of vessels, which created a shortage of boats. Swift currents on all the lakes as well as thick rushes and a natural sand bar across the upper opening of Lake St Clair also hindered schooners sailing between Detroit and Michilimackinac. Vessels often waited weeks for the water to rise over the bar in order to continue provisioning excursions. Frequently, vessels carried lighter loads to facilitate their passage across the sand bar. Larger shipments would be partially unloaded and inadequately sheltered during the winter. Sailors often removed the brine from pork barrels to lighten cargoes. All these measures slowed the delivery of provisions, reduced the amounts of food supplied, and caused great amounts of spoilage. Geography also impeded the provisioning of Ouiatenon and Fort des Miamis. Since the Wabash and Maumee Rivers were navigable only in the spring, troops frequently supplied Ouiatenon and the Fort des Miamis overland. Even in spring the water level was often so low that boats could not travel on these rivers. Amherst brushed aside the weaknesses of the military transportation system, stating that the trip from Niagara to the western district was so long and tedious that it could not be helped that some goods were damaged. In 1761 he advised Detroit commandant Donald Campbell that the centre of each barrel of flour was often edible even if it had been totally submerged in water and admonished that supplying the posts would become impossible unless all but the truly inedible goods were used. Certainly, Amherst declared, conditions at Detroit were no worse than at any other outpost.11 Robert Leake, the commissary general, echoed these sentiments by advocating that the rotten parts of meat could be cut off and fed to Amerindians, while the remainder should be dried for military consumption.12 Because of an unreliable logistical system, Captain Donald Campbell and other fort commandants before 1763 needed to adjust to the reality of wilderness subsistence. Campbell stated that he usually had three weeks of provisions in store for emergencies but that the garrisons could not rely solely on military supplies because of the inadequate transport system and unpredictable weather.13 Both the French and the Amerindian populations were accustomed to selling food to troops, as the French military before 1760 had depended on these resources even more so than the British. After the possession of Detroit in November 1760, Colonel Henry Bouquet, commanding at Fort Pitt and familiar with the tenuous military supply system, ordered Campbell to confiscate all flour and wheat from the French settlers

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and to leave only what was necessary for their own subsistence, the remittance to be agreed on between himself and the inhabitants.14 As well, some 1,100 pounds of flour remained in the storehouse from the French occupation.15 Campbell was to take all gunpowder and lead from the French, too, and redistribute it to French inhabitants who would hunt for the British. He also encouraged the settlers to raise corn and cattle for sale to the garrison. Finally, Bouquet ordered that salt pork from military stores should be used last.16 At a conference at Detroit in December 1760, Superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs William Johnson and George Croghan, his deputy agent, exacted a promise from Amerindians to trade venison and other meat with the western garrisons for powder and lead during their hunting season, which extended to the beginning of March.17 Amerindian groups also provided fresh fish. The Odawas of L’Arbre Croche near Michilimackinac sold corn, bear grease, and maple sugar to this British garrison. As well, the Jesuit mission at St Ignace had a tradition of selling large amounts of corn to this post. Troops also supplemented their diet through regimental effort. In the fall of 1762, Detroit obtained its own fishing net, the only post to have one.18 Archaeological studies of refuse pits have revealed large amounts of bones from passenger pigeons, shot by the troops or possibly by Amerindians.19 Traders or contracting-company agents acted as alternative suppliers. Charles Langlade supplied grain to George Etherington at Michilimackinac, while Henry Bostwick and the company of Levy and Solomon provided grain to Commandant James Gorrell of Fort Edward Augustus at Green Bay.20 Alexander Henry and Jean Baptiste Cadotte sold loads of fish to Michilimackinac in 1762.21 James Sterling, located at Detroit by the winter of 1760, sold food to this garrison. By 1762, as an agent for the company of Duncan, Rutherford, and Livingston, which provisioned the military, even Sterling recognized the dearness of food, especially pork.22 Despite their utility, Amherst generally disapproved of traders, as he felt they “impose[d] upon the Crown.”23 Despite Amherst’s feelings toward traders and other local suppliers, for three years after the original arrangements with the French inhabitants and Amerindians for food, the garrisons constantly relied on their resources to offset the frequent shortages of military provisions. In November 1760, Detroit received only thirty-three barrels of pork from Niagara, as this was all that could be spared. Yet Campbell considered this amount “great Releif” since the troops had only enough flour to supply their needs until mid-month, thirty barrels of pork, and eleven bullocks. Robert Navarre, a French magistrate, furnished the troops with 20,000 pounds of flour, 100 bushels of peas, and unlimited

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Indian corn, with the stipulation that Campbell honour the previous French price of fifty shillings per hundredweight of flour. This, plus venison provided by Natives, still did not reassure Campbell, who lamented to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt that he hoped his garrison would survive until the spring.24 In December, Lieutenant Butler at Fort des Miamis reported that he had no king’s provisions. Consequently, Campbell sent him ammunition to be exchanged for venison with Amerindians, and Butler also supported his garrison throughout the winter with other local resources.25 In early 1761, Campbell reported that the French inhabitants at Detroit continued to supply his garrison with flour and Indian corn and that the Amerindians delivered venison until March.26 The king’s store was almost empty except for some gunpowder, so Campbell had sent ten French men to Fort Pitt for cattle or, if all else failed, provisions on horseback since the lake was blocked.27 By mid-March five small bullocks, 2,000 pounds of venison, and 3,570 pounds of salt pork remained.28 Come spring, Campbell hoped to send boats to Niagara for military provisions, but they were in terrible repair. Unfortunately, there were no boats at Niagara either, so the supplies were left at the carrying place. Since it was “absolutely necessary” to obtain food, Campbell dispatched an officer with twenty men and twenty French Canadians to retrieve 100 barrels of provisions. These turned out to be almost all salt pork. Fort Pitt sent twenty-five bullocks, but Campbell deemed them so underweight as to be unfit to eat. Campbell judged the shipment of flour, which arrived in July, as one-third damaged. By early August, the only flour that the garrison possessed had been obtained from French settlers.29 A return of provisions at Detroit for the period 29 November 1760 to 15 September 1761 reveals the significance of the French settlers to the survival of the British garrison. The military provided approximately 37,676 pounds of flour, while the French had sold them a closely matched 33,873 pounds. The military provided beef and pork, but the French sold the troops 79 1/2 bushels of peas, 390 bushels of corn, and 1,138 pounds of corn meal, items that were not sent to Detroit at all by the commissary general.30 Spring and summer presented other demands on the storehouse at Detroit that military supplies could not meet. Amerindian groups usually migrated from their hunting grounds to the forts for trade and councils, during which they expected to be fed in accordance to their traditional rules of hospitality. At Fort des Miamis, Butler’s garrison was already short on provisions, and his messages stated that he had only enough Indian corn until May 1. Campbell sent him one canoe of provisions and ammunition to trade for fresh meat.31

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Summer was the least dangerous time to initiate occupation of the other remaining forts of Michilimackinac, Edward Augustus, and St Joseph, but Campbell procrastinated simply because he did not have enough provisions to do so. In addition, boats were required to transport provisions to these other posts, but all Detroit vessels were involved in retrieving food from Niagara.32 Finally, in September 1761, Captain Henry Balfour, 120 men, and a detachment of Royal Americans marched to Fort Michilimackinac and continued on to Fort Edward Augustus and to Fort St Joseph. Michilimackinac and Edward Augustus possessed ten months of provisions, and St Joseph had four months of provisions, but this was made possible only by evacuating seventy-five men after the forts were occupied.33 Ouiatenon remained ungarrisoned until more provisions arrived in November 1761. When Lieutenant Edward Jenkins first occupied the post, the Wabash was frozen, forcing him to leave some provisions behind and proceed on foot to the fort. Instead, he purchased 150 bushels of local Indian corn at the Miamis for this fort and for Ouiatenon. Campbell ordered Jenkins to purchase food from the local French and Amerindian families at Ouiatenon for consumption until spring.34 As the winter of 1761–62 approached, Campbell needed to make arrangements for obtaining local resources at Detroit as well in order to supplement the inadequate military stores. Only one barrel of flour remained since much had been condemned and supplying the other posts had reduced their stock.35 Worse yet, the French had experienced a poor grain crop and could spare only 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of flour. Campbell again arranged for the Amerindian venison trade. In January 1762 Campbell continued to obtain flour, corn, and venison from the French and the Amerindians. He also risked sending three small boats to Niagara for flour, but the storehouse had none to spare, so thirty barrels of pork were substituted instead. During the return home, however, the frost hampered navigation, so all the pork had to be left between Niagara and Detroit.36 In the spring of 1762, Campbell hired French settlers to man boats to Niagara for supplies, as he could spare few of his men, who were attending Amerindian councils. Flour was scarce, but he judged that he could maintain the post until supplies arrived. In the meantime, twenty-two barrels of the pork that had been abandoned over the winter arrived. The other forts were also in distress for food, Campbell reported, but he could not relieve them until the rivers cleared. Once the season warmed, Niagara sent 104 barrels of food to Detroit, part of which Campbell forwarded to Michilimackinac, Ouiatenon, Miamis, Edward Augustus, and St Joseph, but there were not enough boats to sufficiently provision these posts. At Fort Miami, Holmes reported in

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May that the Amerindians brought little venison and that what they did bring cost him an exorbitant price. In late July 1762, Jenkins at Ouiatenon reported that three bags of flour were damaged and that a barrel of pork smelled so badly that it was unbearable to be near it. Having only seven days worth of flour and five days of pork, he asked for approval to purchase local supplies. That summer, Ouiatenon depended on the Amerindians, the French from the Illinois country, and trader Richard Winston for subsistence.37 In August at Detroit, Campbell was forced to enter into large contracts for food since he had had “noe assistance.”38 When Major Henry Gladwin arrived at Detroit to replace Campbell, he found Detroit “destitute of provisions” and the outposts improperly supplied because of the disrepair of boats. He ordered restricted rations at all outposts. The vessel Huron brought only thirty barrels of provisions, and Gladwin judged that the forts would be insufficiently supplied to June 1763. Consequently, he sent boats to Niagara for provisions and recommended that all forts plant gardens and obtain corn from Native groups.39 In late September the Huron had not yet returned to Detroit, and Gladwin felt that, unfortunately, the troops depended entirely upon it. A sloop arrived a month later, but Gladwin surmised that the provisions would be insufficient for the winter. That month, Gladwin also purchased seventy bullocks herded by the trader Robert Callendar, but they were too lean to eat.40 Michilimackinac had sufficient supplies to last until next July, but the troops at Fort des Miamis and Ouiatenon were reported to be sickly and destitute. In October, Jenkins at Ouiatenon purchased 3,000 pounds of flour from the French inhabitants, and Gladwin commented that without local resources, troops would have had to abandon the post. In November, because the river was frozen, Detroit troops carried provisions on their backs to Miami. That month, French batteauxmen sent to St Joseph returned to Detroit having been unable to supply the posts; after fifteen weeks of travel, most of the provisions had been damaged or consumed.41 At Sault Ste Marie, Lieutenant John Jamet expressed incredulity that his troops would have to survive on fish during the 1762–63 winter. He had intended to trade liquor for venison and other supplies, but the military prohibited the liquor trade. Worse, his storehouse burned down, leaving the post destitute of any provisions. Consequently, in December 1762 the troops marched to Michilimackinac, forcing its commandant George Etherington to buy more Indian corn and bear grease to feed these extra men.42 Throughout the 1763 winter, Gladwin continued to trade for venison for his troops, which allowed him to send barrels of pork to Michilimackinac in the spring, as he calculated that the post would be

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short in May. In February, Gladwin dispatched some troops to Niagara because he could no longer provision them.43 At Ouiatenon, Jenkins complained that the pork provided was hardly eatable.44 With the exception of Detroit, the summer of 1763 was the final season of the British occupation of the west until after Pontiac’s uprising. Military provisioning during this summer was even more precarious than it had been in previous years due to the uprising, thus affecting the diplomatic course of the war. Gorrell’s garrison at Green Bay lived on short rations before their evacuation in June, and it was assumed that the Fort St Joseph garrison would have to abandon this post due to lack of flour.45 Detroit, under attack in early May, possessed less than three weeks of restricted rations and could not obtain local resources because Pontiac had threatened to kill any French settler who provided food to the troops; indeed, many inhabitants hid their food from the British in hopes of starving them out. A few French settlers provided the post with provisions at “the utmost peril of their lives.” Later, Campbell agreed to talk with Pontiac, as there was no other way to obtain food. This council allowed troops to purchase corn, flour, and bear grease and provided safe passage across the river to buy more flour from the French.46 The British attempted to relieve Detroit several times. In May on Lake Erie, Natives attacked troops led by Lieutenant Abraham Cuyler, and almost all provisions were captured or destroyed. A vessel arrived in June, however, and Captain James Dalzell and his men managed to bring supplies to Detroit in July. The Huron and the Michigan also arrived with food, despite attacks by Pontiac on the vessels. Stormy weather delayed another attempt under Major Wilkins to provision Detroit in October. This group returned to Niagara in November, as most provisions had been lost or spoiled. By mid-October Gladwin needed flour and therefore agreed to a peace when Pontiac requested one. He subsequently decided to reduce the number of the Detroit garrison to 212 men, as he possessed enough provisions for only this number until spring.47 The Detroit soldiers also obtained supplies from the French and British traders during Pontiac’s uprising. From late August to November 1763, Gladwin purchased approximately 35,000 pounds of flour, 558 bushels of wheat, 272 bushels of corn, 61 bushels of peas, 19,000 pounds of beef, and 1,173 pounds of pork from the French and 2,800 pounds of flour, 60 bushels of wheat, 26 bushels of corn, 19 bushels of peas, and 950 pounds of beef from traders James Sterling and Edward Moran.48 While the British garrisons depended on both Amerindians and French settlers for provisioning before 1763, they also relied on the

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French for quartering at the forts. As late as 1768, Gage complained that it was extraordinary that there was no Crown land within the fort itself.49 He was describing Michilimackinac, but French settlers owned most of the land within all western district forts after 1760. At Detroit the final French commandant, François de Bellestre, had granted many of his countrymen land both within and around the fort. Moreover, a clause of the Articles of Capitulation of New France stipulated that all French private property ownership would be honoured. Consequently, British soldiers quartered in French houses. Michilimackinac also rented its provision storehouse from the French, and although Amherst granted approval for a British-owned storehouse in 1762, it was not completely constructed until 1773. In the meantime, the troops kept both their provisions and artillery in private houses. Even bullocks bought for food had to be billeted for a price at French stables. This private ownership concerned the British military especially since the French demanded rent for housing the troops. Another problem concerned the poor living conditions. The French semidetached houses had been constructed of pickets with a half second storey. The troops constantly complained of the clay chinking that fell from the walls and of the frequent necessity of rethatching the roofs. At Michilimackinac, many of the houses inhabited by the soldiers were located dangerously close to the powder magazine and were subject to the weather and to blowing winds.50 Given the British reliance on Amerindians and French settlers in provisioning and quartering, the commandants in the western district faced the intricate problem of balancing diverse interests. Campbell at Detroit understood the urgency with which those in charge of the posts needed to obtain provisions and the necessity of providing ammunition to Amerindians in exchange. He stated that it was the single most requested item by the Amerindians and that it would be imprudent to refuse. Deprivation of presents could cause “fatal Consequences.” The isolation of the posts and the small number of soldiers necessitated that the Native groups be kept in good humour.51 When Lieutenant Jenkins attempted to take possession of Ouiatenon, the Natives would not allow him to do so unless he agreed to exchange ammunition and other trade goods for meat.52 At Edward Augustus there were rumours of Amerindian attacks on the fort, and consequently the steady stream of visiting Native groups for councils must have been a threatening experience for the British. Twelve Sioux arrived in March 1763 and offered Gorrell the command of 30,000 warriors, and the “King” of the Sac Nation informed him that he controlled 250 warriors.53 As Gorrell commanded fewer than twenty men at Edward Augustus, he was clearly outnumbered if the Native groups decided to attack.

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Campbell often stated that he needed to give ammunition to Amerindians, as his garrison’s subsistence depended on it. He also complained that he needed to send gunpowder to St Joseph, the Miamis, and Ouiatenon for their provisioning, but Major Walters at Niagara consistently refused to ship any to him unless Amherst approved.54 Amherst disapproved of the ammunition trade for fresh venison and other game that occurred at western outposts because gunpowder gave the Natives “means of Doing mischief.” While he agreed that the ammunition trade was useful for providing venison for the troops, he suggested that it be given sparingly. Amherst also believed that a scarcity of gunpowder would keep the Amerindians “quiet,” whereas the western commandants believed that such a scarcity provoked Native groups.55 As a result of his pervasive distrust of the Amerindians and constant rumours of Native attacks before 1763, Amherst deliberately created a shortage of ammunition in the west. Amherst also continually reprimanded his charges that Amerindian expenses were too high and that such presents simply acted as bribes for good behaviour. To emphasize the necessity of economizing, Amherst reminded commandants that all accounts at outlying posts must be approved by Campbell at Detroit and then by himself. His frequent complaints, however, indicated that commandants did not obey his orders. The garrison leaders knew that a restricted gunpowder trade and limited trade goods created only hostility; additionally, Natives used this same ammunition to hunt for meat to feed the troops themselves. Amherst’s constraints, instead of limiting Native violence, helped to foster Pontiac’s uprising and also limited the amount of food that the garrisons received. Campbell also worried about the defence of the forts, as many had rotting palisades. He judged Ouiatenon to be exposed to the “Insults of the Indians” because it was “unfitt for any kind of Defence.” As well, due to their exchanges for food, many Native groups had a glimpse into the workings of the forts and the garrisons, a kind of intelligence operation, as McConnell argues.56 The sloops and schooners that sailed the Great Lakes with precious provisions were also vulnerable to Amerindian attack, so the military armed their boats; for example, by 1763, the Huron possessed four four-pounders, while the Michigan sloop carried six eight-pounders. Armed vessels were also a visual reminder of British might since many Amerindians located their villages on the shores of the Great Lakes.57 But outnumbered and partially dependent on the Amerindians for subsistence, the British military operated at a disadvantage, as Pontiac’s uprising shows. Similarly, the British acknowledged their precarious relationship with the French population remaining at many of the interior posts after 1760. Although the French inhabitants were officially subjects of

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Britain, the French maintained their old alliance with Native groups who were also former enemies of the British. Consequently, the commandants realized that they needed to make concessions if they were to receive the reluctant cooperation of these groups in provisioning and quartering. Although the British had confiscated all guns of the French inhabitants after 1760, commandants redistributed them at various times for their subsistence and that of the garrison. This, however, was to be “an Indulgence.”58 All officers were instructed not to “insult” the French or their property and to watch strictly the treatment of the settlers by the troops.59 The military paid for all provisions by vouchers, a type of promissory note, which Amherst reimbursed when returns of provisions reached him. In September 1761 the French started to complain that their accounts were not being paid promptly and that there were too many troops to support.60 In response, it appears that Amherst began to settle these vouchers every few months beginning in December 1761.61 British fears of this unstable alliance with the French were reinforced when many French settlers participated in or aided Pontiac’s uprising and remained in their settlements after the Natives overran all forts but Detroit. After the uprising, British attitudes toward the Amerindian and French populations hardened. The Articles of Peace in August 1764 attempted to solve the problems of the previous logistical system, in which the military had depended on these potentially hostile groups for survival. The smaller posts of Ouiatenon, Edward Augustus, Miamis, and St Joseph were abandoned. Colonel John Bradstreet recommended ceding French land around Detroit and Michilimackinac to promote British agriculture as a measure of selfsufficiency, in comparison to Johnson and Croghan’s treaty in December 1760, which asked for Native provisioning. The garrisons also relied more on the increased number of ships on the Great Lakes, raised livestock, built their own barracks for quartering, and purchased provisions from British traders who were considered more trustworthy allies. This shift in relationships attempted to exclude gradually the French and Amerindians, although the latter group continued to antagonize the military’s improved provisioning system. Detroit had maintained its military presence during Pontiac’s uprising, and Captain William Howard reestablished Michilimackinac in September 1764.62 These two posts benefited from the strengthened logistical system. In 1764 the British constructed Fort Erie at the eastern end of Lake Erie to store provisions specifically for the western district. Fort Sinclair, a new post built in 1765 at the southern end of Lake Huron, housed food when necessary between supply trips. While schooners reached Detroit and Michilimackinac only once or twice a

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summer before 1764, trips were made three, four, or more times after reoccupation. Scheduled voyages left the Fort Erie storehouse for Detroit, travelled to Michilimackinac, and returned to start again. In this way, by the late 1760s, the upper posts were supplied for the winter, if not for twelve consecutive months. The military also increased the number of vessels on the Great Lakes. Instead of only two schooners, the military operated the Gladwin, the Charlotte, and the Boston after 1764; in 1770 it constructed the Chippeway and in 1772 the General Gage and Earl of Dunmore. Although both the Gladwin and the Charlotte were rotten in many places, and rebuilt several times, they lasted until September 1771. Despite the periodic dry-docking of these ships, they managed to supply the posts fairly adequately. Commandants also purchased boats from traders, but Gage continually emphasized the repair of military vessels instead, consistent with his goal of increased selfsufficiency of the garrisons. Although the British reorganized and strengthened their logistical system after Pontiac’s uprising, the same geographical impediments remained. The passage between Lakes St Clair and Huron had been investigated in 1762 and 1763, but the shifting sands made it difficult to plot a feasible route.63 In 1764 Patrick St Clair sounded the depth of the water over the sand bar, determined its width, and sought out the ideal route between the islands of Lake St Clair, all in order to facilitate ease of provisioning. Yet when a schooner successfully crossed the sand bar in 1764, it was deemed accidental.64 Instead, when the water was too low, it was common for vessels to meet on opposite sides of the sand bar and exchange contents. In 1769 Commandant Thomas Bruce of Detroit informed Gage that a Mr Grant had purchased a vessel that could hold thirty barrels of food and still pass the sand bar, apparently a significant event.65 Not until 1770 was a craft constructed that could pass over the sand bar.66 In 1771 Gage ordered Commandant Stevenson at Michilimackinac to ensure that all military boats built in the future be able to cross the sand bar.67 Despite the overall improvements in the transportation of provisions, garrisons still experienced deprivation during the winter of 1764–65 and therefore partially relied on local resources. Much of the flour at Michilimackinac had spoiled, and there was not enough salt pork. Fearing that a schooner would not arrive before the winter, Commandant Howard purchased Indian corn, although this would feed only half the garrison, and Colonel John Bradstreet arranged for the French to provide him fish. If a vessel had not reached the post by the first day of October, the troops were ordered to abandon Michilimackinac and return to Detroit. In fact, Howard dispatched fifty men in mid-October, although they returned after seeing a vessel on its way to

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the post.68 Bradstreet had ordered this expedition, anticipating that if no military provisions arrived by May, even the French would starve, as the military had taken their food.69 In October, if it had become necessary, Detroit would have been unable to support these extra men. Being destitute of any stores for its own garrison, this post experienced “great distress.” As a result, Commandant John Campbell informed Gage that provisions could be obtained more easily and cheaply within the settlement and asked Gage’s permission to do so.70 Gage dismissed the idea of local provisioning unless absolutely necessary because of the great number of supplies at the storehouse at Fort Erie, and he also admonished Howard for acting precipitously in buying corn at Michilimackinac.71 But before the Gladwin arrived at Detroit in May 1765, the troops had been reduced to eating rotten pork and spoiled flour supplemented with fish that they had caught themselves. In July, Campbell lamented that the Natives were coming for their annual councils at a time when he had no provisions to give them.72 In May, Michilimackinac troops had to eat rotten pork before a ship arrived, but by August 1765 the post reported enough Crown provisions to last until June 1766 as long as none spoiled. When the food was examined in October, however, much had been damaged, and if more provisions were not sent immediately, the garrison would have none by mid-January. As a result, Commandant Campbell at Detroit forwarded supplies to Michilimackinac.73 Detroit appeared to have sufficient food until April or May, but in April, Campbell assessed French resources in case he needed to supplement the troops’ flour and meat. In May he estimated that Michilimackinac had again run short of provisions and shipped food to the western post.74 In 1766 Gage began to question increasingly the large numbers of provisions that the garrisons at Fort Erie, Detroit, and Michilimackinac frequently condemned as unfit for consumption. He advised that all barrels should be thoroughly examined, noting that often only part of the barrel was spoiled and that the rest remained edible. He also believed that soldiers refused food on “light pretences,” especially since much of the military supplies had been sent from Quebec within the last year.75 Commissaries were ordered to ensure that barrels of pork were filled with brine, often removed by transporters to lighten loads, and to maintain all food quality.76 Gage also suspected that contractors often delivered spoiled food to military storehouses. Military provisions for the winter of 1766–67 continued to be of poor quality, and the troops again turned to outside sources. At Michilimackinac, by February, the pork appeared to be so rotten that troops fished for trout instead.77 In the spring of 1767, Captain

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George Turnbull at Detroit condemned large amounts of provisions due to their damage by weather and Amerindian attacks. Many barrels, he reported, were not of full weight either.78 As a result, both Detroit and Michilimackinac experienced shortages in flour, and Turnbull contracted trader James Sterling to supply seventy barrels for both garrisons.79 Gage continued to reprimand Turnbull and Commandant Rogers at Michilimackinac over the amounts of food declared unfit.80 By mid-June 1767 food was scarce at both forts; on 6 June, Michilimackinac possessed only two days worth of flour and no pork at all, and at Detroit, by the time the schooner arrived mid-month, they had been “borrowing” provisions for days.81 Thoughout the season, Turnbull at Detroit continued to press for Gage’s approval of a local provisioning system, as he believed that it would be cheaper and would ensure the freshness of food.82 That summer, Gage agreed to consider Turnbull’s request for an official system to incorporate local French provisions, but he also decided that the upper posts should be victualled with twelve months of military provisions, increasing the self-sufficiency of the garrisons.83 By August, Turnbull reported that one more trip by the Charlotte would provide enough food for the winter. A few months later, he confirmed that provisioning had never been this sufficient before. He also reported that the French farmers had suggested that within three to four years, they could fully furnish Detroit, Michilimackinac, and perhaps even Niagara with flour.84 In January 1768 Detroit still had plenty of supplies, but by April the troops had consumed most of their food, and ice hindered transportation on Lake Huron. Pork was so scarce that the troops purchased provisions from the French inhabitants. Only one-and-a-half barrels of pork remained before the Charlotte returned.85 Gage reminded the upper posts that they would be victualled for twelve months at all times and consequently reprimanded the commandants who purchased supplies from the locals when sufficient provisions awaited shipment at the Fort Erie storehouse.86 On its third trip in 1768, the Charlotte delivered winter provisions to Michilimackinac, supposedly enough until October 1769.87 However, a schooner containing some much-needed flour later became stranded at Sandusky, so Turnbull contracted James Sterling for 37,000 pounds of flour for both Detroit and Michilimackinac until April 1769. Sterling also began to provide fresh meat for Detroit in 1768.88 In case of further accidents, Turnbull assessed the amount of provisions that the French settlers at Detroit could provide, but another schooner arrived in November. Gage hoped that they would have enough food, but if not, he agreed that local sources could provide what was needed. However, he cautioned Turnbull not to enter

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into a contract. In fact, in light of his new decision of longer-term provisioning, Gage felt that Turnbull had entered into the commitment with Sterling too hastily, resulting in a surplus of flour.89 Both garrisons had provisions for the winter of 1769–70 stocked by the fall of 1769. By September 1770 Turnbull, then at Michilimackinac, reported that he had all the necessary provisions for winter, and Detroit needed only one more shipment to be fully provisioned. By the summer of 1771 Michilimackinac was short once again, having only five barrels of pork left.90 This garrison also complained of a pork shortage in the fall of 1771 due to condemnation, although Stevenson at Detroit admitted that this was now unusual.91 Although the schooner excursions became more efficient, storage of the military provisions continued to be inadequate. In 1764 Campbell stated that Detroit needed a storehouse because the buildings were in such poor repair that the food spoiled. Only a foundation for a storehouse had been completed by the fall of 1765. In 1772 Commandant Henry Basset at Detroit reported that the storehouse was again in neglected condition.92 At Michilimackinac, the garrison also needed a new storehouse. In 1770 Turnbull described the storehouse as an old tumbling-down shack, and leaks in this poorly constructed building caused spoilage of the food. In 1771 Turnbull feared that the building would be blown over by the wind. By the fall of 1772 Michilimackinac had a half-built storehouse but no carpenter to complete the structure. It was finally finished in 1773.93 Commandants also increased their garrisons’ self-sufficiency. After Pontiac’s uprising in 1763, Amherst estimated that only four days’ ration was needed each week per soldier, as the troops could hunt, fish, and garden for themselves.94 In the spring and summer of 1765, the men at Michilimackinac supplied the mess with fish every day.95 In February 1767, when the pork at Michilimackinac was almost rotten, the troops caught hundreds of trout, which they consumed two days a week to stretch out supplies.96 Gardening also contributed to the military diet, although it is unclear when it began under British occupation. A map of Detroit in 1760 shows a garden behind the house of the commanding officer. Gladwin reported that he was making a garden in April 1763, and his sergeant died in Pontiac’s uprising while working in the garden, yet there is little mention of gardening in the military correspondence until later.97 In 1765 the garden was enlarged to extend the whole length of the fort, a gardener was hired from the Engineering Department, and Campbell ordered a greenhouse to be constructed to preserve the vegetables all winter.98 That same year, at Michilimackinac, Commandant Howard had the French guardhouse and a private dwelling

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knocked down and turned the plots of land into gardens. As well, the Magra map of 1766 shows a large garden outside the pickets of the fort near the stables.99 A third garden next to the Jesuits’ old church existed at least until 1769.100 The Detroit troops also increased self-sufficiency by raising livestock on the Isle au Couchon, or Hog Island, which offered grazing opportunities protected from Native hunting. When several officers applied to Gage for permission to settle on the island, Campbell protested that it was the only nearby place to keep livestock safe from Amerindian slaughter, to grow grain, and to cut hay and firewood.101 Turnbull awarded the island to Royal American George McDougal in 1769, although several French families claimed commonage rights for the past sixty years. Despite their petition, the island was given to McDougal in the hopes that the improvements would help to support Detroit troops.102 As well, some individual officers owned cows, sheep, pigs, or chickens, which were used to supplement their personal diet.103 Although the military logistical system continued to be inconsistent after 1764, the British did increase the self-sufficiency of their western garrisons. Until 1768 winter months witnessed the highest shortage of provisions, and isolated by the weather, the commandants purchased local supplies. In the early 1770s, however, the winter months were securely provisioned, while the summers showed a shortage in military supplies, so the diet was supplemented with vegetables and livestock. Traders offered another alternative source of provisions and other supplies, but Gage resisted their use due to their high prices. The military, however, had to fall back on this group when the Fort Erie storehouse failed to fulfil its needs. Trader John Askin, employed as the commissary of Michilimackinac after 1764, was responsible for supplying the troops with fresh provisions. He was granted several plots of land, was in command of the fort garden, and controlled fields of the Odawa village at L’Arbre Croche. The latter were used to raise corn for canoe-trip provisions, but it is possible that the yield was also traded to the British troops nearby. By 1773 Askin also owned gardens at Three Mile Pond, once used by Amerindians, near Michilimackinac. Although fur trader Peter Pond described the land surrounding the fort as barren and sandy, Askin used manure as fertilizer to grow an amazing variety of products. He also practised crop rotation, which allowed for more intensive farming and extended the fertility of the land for longer sedentary cultivation. With the assistance of his slaves Pompey and Toon, Askin planted parsnips, onions, beans, squash, cucumbers, spinach, pumpkins, cabbage, parsley, beets, lettuce, turnips, shallots, oats, buckwheat, Indian corn, rye grass, and clover. Askin also fished in Lake Michigan, although it is unknown whether he provided his

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catches to the troops. The commissary also possessed three pigs, numerous hens, fowls and roosters, sheep, and at least two cows, which proliferated greatly.104 James Sterling was another trader at the upper posts. He accumulated military vouchers in return for provisions105 and provided smaller boats used in the transportation of needed stores to Detroit. In 1768 he was assigned not only to provide fresh meat for the garrisons, but also to victual the vessels themselves. As a result, he became a middleman, usurping direct control over garrison resources from the settlers. The repair of boats was also awarded to Sterling, leaving him to deal with the scarcity of pitch, oakum, and tar. At Michilimackinac, Askin’s private ownership of several vessels, including the Martha, decreased the necessity of military-owned boats and gave him greater power in the supply system. Other traders also supplemented the military diet. In 1766 Robert Callendar proposed to grow grain on Hog Island near Detroit in order to feed cattle, which would then be slaughtered for use by the garrison.106 Henry Van Schaack supplied fresh beef to Detroit troops.107 James Sterling sold 6,630 weight of flour to Michilimackinac in 1767, and the same year, Gershom Levy sold 4,000 weight of meat and a boat to the military at this post.108 Michilimackinac continued to host a significant market, at which Amerindians offered maple sugar, dried venison, corn, beans, and bear grease to traders, but whether the military purchased any of these commodities is not recorded. During the winter of 1767, Robert Rogers, commandant of Michilimackinac, documented several instances of local groups, including those from Grand Sable Island, the Chippewa of Cheboigan, and the Mississaugas from Thunder Bay, bringing fresh meat in exchange for gunpowder, shot, rum, vermillion, and tobacco.109 Mention of Native-supplied food in the correspondence between fort commandants and General Gage, however, is limited after 1764. As well, Amerindians around Detroit had begun to evacuate the area, depriving the troops of hunters. While the British military increased its self-sufficiency in provisioning, the troops also attempted to provide adequate shelter of their own rather than utilize French housing. In 1764 Captain Howard at Michilimackinac described the French residences as rotten and barely able to weather the winter.110 The next year, Howard argued that if barracks were not built the following summer, the garrison would not be able to live at the fort.111 In 1766 Howard continued to push for the construction of barracks partly because the French demanded rent for the extensive period that the troops had lived and stored food in their homes. To the British, it was also unsatisfactory to have a mixed military

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and civilian community.112 As well, many of the houses were still in poor repair, and it was customary for the soldiers themselves to pay for their improvements.113 In late 1768 barracks at Michilimackinac could not be constructed because the French privately owned most property inside the fort, but by late 1769 two rooms of the final four of the new barracks had been completed. As a result, some of the troops still lived in French homes, although these were in “ruinous Condition.” In 1770, even after the garrison was reduced, Glazier still did not have enough room, a complaint voiced again in 1772.114 Michilimackinac also continued to use a privately owned storehouse. In 1769 Commandant Glazier reported that he had to pay rent for the use of this space.115 Not until 1773 did the British military possess its own storehouse. At Detroit, conditions were equally poor. In 1764 the houses were so ramshackled that the wind and weather penetrated the walls; nor was there any material to repair them. The foundations of the barracks that had been begun that year could not be completed, as there was a lack of sawyers and cut timber. In 1765 the commandant was in fact renting a house from Bellestre, who also rented other houses for the artillery stores, provisions, the surgeon, and a few other men. Even when the Detroit barracks were built, they were completely constructed on private property.116 Attempts by the British to increase their self-sufficiency respecting the logistical system affected their relationships with the Amerindian and French populations in varied ways. Although Amerindian provisioning of the British declined after 1764, the possibility of a Native attack on the military supply system or the forts continued, so the British continued to treat the Amerindians with caution. In 1765 the troops still heard rumours that Native groups were waiting to ambush supply shipments or that Detroit would be attacked. In 1767, the year that Gage decided that all posts should be victualled for twelve months, he advocated that these stocks be in place by March of every year. Since Natives gathered at forts from April to October, if they decided to attack then, garrisons would have a full year’s supply of food and be able to withstand an assault without fear of starvation.117 In 1768 Gage anticipated conflict, as the Natives seemed displeased, and he advised the garrisons at Detroit and Michilimackinac to stock up on provisions, including those from the French settlements.118 Gage still expressed concern over the vulnerability of his troops in the western district. He noted that the Native population outnumbered the military at Detroit. In 1766 he reported that the poor condition of the stockade made Detroit hardly defensible, and in 1769 he considered Michilimackinac inadequate to withstand a Native assault, despite the six and nine pound cannons mounted on the bastions.119

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As a result, storehouses could be easily raided. As in other areas of the Ohio Valley, Amerindians also attacked woodcutting parties or cattle owned by the inhabitants of Detroit if the military did not offer small gifts to ensure their safety or if the soldiers had not asked permission to use Native hunting grounds.120 By 1769 all provisioning vessels wintered at the Detroit wharf and were therefore more protected from Native assault; Commandant Bruce commented that this would “greatly discourage them from beginning any disturbances when they see that we can always furnish ourselves with provisions.” But Gage still worried about the schooners on their travels. He ordered that schooners on the Great Lakes were never to be exposed, especially if these boats were grounded on the sandbar, since he feared possible attack and capture of provisions for a quick profit. He required even smaller boats to be armed and able to cross the sandbar with full loads to dissuade attacks.121 Schooners were armed yet not always ready for attack; for example, in 1773 the Earl of Dunmore possessed four cannons on board, but no shot or powder. Consequently, its master, Robison, considered it to be defenceless. He asked for arms and ammunition to defend this vessel and its cargo of provisions, on which Michilimackinac depended.122 British military attitudes toward Native conflict remained cautious after Pontiac’s uprising. Although various groups such as the Chippewa alleged that they would fight for the British, distrust was pervasive, a feeling returned by Native Americans. Acknowledging their precarious position, the British set regulations in 1764 that allowed only ten Amerindians inside any fort at once, and each fort was to open only one well-guarded wicket for trade. As Turnbull concluded, the Amerindians needed to fear the British as well as love them.123 This cautious attitude of the British affected their treatment of crimes committed by Natives in the Old Northwest. The military participated in middle-ground diplomacy, which mandated giving gifts and speeches and infrequent use of the British justice system. When two traders were robbed near Grand Portage in 1770, for example, Gage simply responded that “[t]hese are accidents that will happen.” Another incident further illustrated his attitude. Serindac, a trader, was fatally stabbed by a Chippewa, who in turn was killed by another trader, Joseph Ainse. The British gave rum and tobacco in condolence for the dead Chippewa and presents to an Amerindian who was wounded in the scuffle. Turnbull recounted that the Natives who came to Michilimackinac for condolence and reparation left satisfied with the settlement. Gage approved of Turnbull’s treatment of the situation.124 Other situations of theft and murder were remedied with comparable laxity. The murderers of a man named Clark were treated leniently, although the British did not necessarily

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prosecute those who committed violent acts toward Amerindians either. When a French Michilimackinac resident murdered a Native in selfdefence, Turnbull “did not think is necessary to take any further cognisance” of the inhabitant.125 French compliance or participation in Pontiac’s uprising increased British distrust of the settlers. As a result, they attempted to reduce their dependence on the French, which made the troops more capable of asserting their authority. By 1766 Turnbull at Detroit managed to lower the previously high prices for French meat and flour, which before 1763 the military was forced to pay out of desperation. In 1768 Turnbull banned exporting French grain of any kind without his written permission.126 Increasingly, the British dealt more forcibly with the French in matters of quartering. At Detroit in 1763 Gage refused to allow Campbell to pay rent to Bellestre. He considered quartering to be a duty of the French. He did, however, instruct Campbell to exchange French land within the fort for an equal measure outside the post to solve the problem of private property. The military and the French continued to struggle over private property ownership. In 1765 Campbell complained that Bellestre’s rent was too high; obviously, the British still paid him rent. As well, although the French had agreed to exchange their land in order for barracks to be built, they later reneged.127 Campbell calculated that barracks for officers, three companies, and a detachment of artillery were needed.128 In 1766 the British attitude hardened, as the French continued to resist giving up their land inside the post. Gage refused to pay Bellestre any more rent and ordered that the commanding officer live in the barracks. With fewer men posted at Detroit, Gage calculated that this should reduce the need for the quartering of men by the French.129 Gage also ordered that settlers had to present their deeds by June 1768 or forfeit their lands. By 1770 Gage declared all grants made by Bellestre to be invalid. The French responded by sending to Gage a memorial and a list of grants made by both Amerindians and Commandant Henry Gladwin in the early 1760s. Gage responded by ordering that after the harvest in 1771, all residents of unresolved claims had to evacuate their property, and he annulled those grants made by any British official previously since no one had possessed the power to do so.130 Quitrents, or money paid in lieu of required services, were also a contentious issue. In 1762 taxes on property inside the fort totalled over £184, and the French and the merchants were required to provide wooden pickets to repair the defences of the fort. In 1766 the quitrents increased, but due to the “heaviness of this tax,” most did not pay them.131 Instead, the British asked for firewood in lieu of the

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quitrents.132 These monies were suspended later that year since the French complained, and Gage felt that the quartering of troops balanced out their unpaid quitrents. But when the troops moved into their new barracks at Detroit, the quitrents were reinstated. In 1767 Gage asserted that if the French did not fulfil the conditions of their land grants, the property would be confiscated. By June, Turnbull reported that the settlers had provided their quota of pickets, but in October he complained that the French had later refused to supply them.133 In 1768 the military taxed the inhabitants and merchants for repairs of the fort since the soldiers had replaced 300 wooden pickets themselves, although the French resisted paying.134 Supplying pickets and repair of the fort continued to be a struggle between the military and the French. In 1770 Gage finally stated that if they did not provide pickets for the stockade and fulfil all other aspects of their grants, then their land would be confiscated and given to those who would obey him. A report a year later noted that the French had once again not repaired their allotted pickets.135 To a certain extent, the orders given by General Thomas Gage, and by General Jeffrey Amherst before him, agreed with military strategy but did not necessarily reflect the reality of daily life in the Old Northwest. Richard White suggests that Amherst’s distant treatment of Natives as conquered subjects and his policy of reduced presents, particularly gunpowder, “cracked” middle-ground diplomacy.136 The troops in the western district, however, had to mediate their official orders given the political pressures from the French and Native populations and the inefficient system of military logistics. The commandants needed the Amerindians to help feed their troops and thus exchanged gunpowder, albeit in amounts limited by Amherst, for provisions. Before Pontiac’s uprising in 1763, the commandants of the forts of Detroit, Michilimackinac, St Joseph, Ouiatenon, Edward Augustus, and Miami interacted with Native and French groups in a market in which their goods and their skills in hunting, agriculture, and shelter made them valuable to the British. The commandants agreed to the high French prices for produce and housing and to the Amerindian stipulation that ammunition be exchanged for the provision of fresh meat, although Amherst commanded the officers to be thrifty in their expenses and deplored arming their former enemies. Viewing the provisioning and quartering of the British garrisons as an interconnected system of military, French, and Amerindian resources, which changed between 1760 and 1773, thus qualifies the meaning of the middle-ground model and its equal application to all groups residing in the Old Northwest. Outnumbered, especially at the smaller posts of Edward Augustus, Miamis, Ouiatenon, and St Joseph,

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and partially reliant on the French and Natives for survival, the British commandants feared angering these groups and consequently treated them leniently. Reliant on their former enemies, and attacked and overrun during Pontiac’s uprising, the British garrisons clearly did not hold the power in this area. In fact, the local French and Amerindian groups who possessed crucial skills and resources operated at an advantage, one that they could exploit when the British military needed food and housing that its logistical system could not provide. Thus, as Brett Rushforth shows in the case of the French and the Fox Wars, there was an imbalance of power and limited negotiation, in contrast to the middle-ground model, which posits roughly equal powers, neither of whom could overpower the other and thus resorted to mediation.137 The conflict in 1763 reaffirmed the previous alliance of the French and many Native nations against the British. Increasingly distrustful of these groups, the British enhanced their self-sufficiency by building barracks, improving the system for transporting provisions, and developing local resources through gardening, fishing, and raising livestock, and when necessary they purchased supplies from British or colonial traders and French farmers. The army attempted to increase its dominance over the French settlers, but the British troops still feared the local Amerindians in the 1770s. Although the Natives were no longer important to army subsistence, and therefore could not demand ammunition in exchange, Amerindians still outnumbered the garrisons, and the British forts and provision schooners were vulnerable to attack. This shift in the logistical system also qualifies our understanding of the middle-ground model in the Old Northwest. While they were forced to follow middle-ground protocol, the British had never shared the cultural meanings that were newly created, as the French and Amerindians did. In fact, after 1764 the military population at the remaining posts of Detroit and Michilimackinac increasingly withdrew from their daily interaction with Amerindian and French groups as they reduced their reliance on them as a means of provisioning and quartering. The British troops functioned in the middle ground out of expediency and preferred to extract themselves from this cultural network and to build a self-sufficient military system in the Old Northwest.

notes 1 I gratefully acknowledge the assistance and suggestions provided by Ian Steele, Nancy Rhoden, Sandy Campbell, Brian Dunnigan, and the two anonymous reviewers of this volume. Financial support through the Jacob M. Price Visiting Fellowship at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann

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Arbor, and through the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Rural History at the University of Guelph allowed me the necessary time for research and revisions. Campbell to Amherst, 18 September 1761, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 53, 63, War Office 34, General Jeffrey Amherst Papers, 1760–63, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa (hereafter ap); Return of Provisions, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 64, ap. Brian Dunnigan, The Necessity of Regularity in Quartering Soldiers: The Organization, Material Culture and Quartering of the British Soldiers at Michilimackinac (Youngstown: Mackinac State Historic Parks, 1999), 17. Ration amounts and food substitutions varied. The Articles of Agreement, 4 February 1765, General Thomas Gage Papers, 1763–73, American Series, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (hereafter gp), state that North American rations were eight pounds of fresh meat or five pounds of salt meat and nine pounds of flour or bread. Bouquet to Ellis, 15 July 1757, Henry Bouquet, Papers, ed. S.K. Stevens, Donald H. Kent, and Autumn L. Leonard (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1972) (hereafter bp), vol. 1, 142, states that in South Carolina provisions were seven pounds of bread or flour, seven pounds of beef or four pounds of pork, three pints of peas, one pound of cheese or six ounces of butter, and one pound of flour or a half pound of rice. I use Dunnigan’s amounts here, as they are specific to the Old Northwest. It is difficult to use returns of provisions to calculate food supplies because barrels could be in English, Irish, or American poundage. Dunnigan, Necessity of Regularity, 23, states that flour barrels were 210 pounds, pork 208 pounds, rice 217 pounds, and butter 62 to 65 pounds and that there were between 3 1/2 and 5 bushels of peas in a barrel. The Return of Provisions for 5 July 1761, vol. 49, 44, ap, states that the flour barrels recorded here were 178 pounds each, while pork was 180 pounds per barrel, and bullocks were on average 350 pounds. If Dunnigan’s amounts are used, then the salt pork and beef would have lasted until late July, but there would have been only enough flour until mid-February, and even the substitution of corn would not have lasted until spring. If the amounts from the July 1761 return are used, then the salt pork and beef would have lasted until early April and the flour until late January. The number of soldiers at Detroit is recorded in Return of Garrison, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 65, ap. Return of Garrison, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 65, ap; Amherst to Campbell, 23 November 1761, vol. 49, 289, ap. Daniel Beattie, “The Adaption of the British Army to Wilderness Warfare, 1755–1763,” in Maarten Ultee, ed., Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century, 56–83 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986); Dunnigan, Necessity of Regularity; Donald P. Heldman and Roger T. Grange, Excavations at Fort Michilimackinac, 1978–1979: The Rue de la Babillarde, Archaeological Completion Report, ser. 3 (Michigan: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1981), 1–43; Roger T. Grange, Excavations at Fort Mackinac, 1980–1982: The

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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Provision Storehouse, Archaeological Completion Report, ser. 12 (Mackinac Island: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1987); George S. May, “The Mess at Mackinac, or No More Sagamity for me, thank you!” Mackinac History 5 (1964): 2–6; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1725–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 153– 5; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 266; Walter S. Dunn, Jr, Opening New Markets: The British Army and the Old Northwest (Westport: Praeger, 2002); Walter S. Dunn, Jr, Frontier Profit and Loss: The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760–1764 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998); Walter S. Dunn, Jr, The New Imperial Economy: The British Army and the American Frontier, 1764–1768 (Westport: Praegar, 2001). Elizabeth May Scott, “‘Such Diet as befitted his Station as Clerk’: The Archaeology of Subsistence and Cultural Diversity at Fort Michilimackinac Island, 1761–1781” (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1991); Michael N. McConnell, Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 100–13; Gary Shapiro, “Early British Subsistence Strategy at Michilimackinac: An Analysis of Faunal Remains from the 1977 Excavation Season,” in Donald P. Heldman, ed., Excavations at Fort Michilimackinac, 1977: House 1 of the South Southeast Row House, Archaeological Completion Report, ser. 2, 161–77 (Michigan: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1978), 163; Terrance J. Martin, “A Faunal Analysis of Fort Ouiatenon, an Eighteenth-Century Trading Post in the Wabash Valley of Indiana” (PhD thesis, Michigan State University, 1986), 341. Charles E. Cleland, Comparison of the Faunal Remains from French and British Refuse Pits at Fort Michilimackinac: A Study in Changing Subsistence Patterns, Canadian Historical Site Occasional Papers 3 (Ottawa: National Historic Sites Service, 1970), 8–22; McConnell, A Country Between, 153–6; McConnell, Army and Empire, 110. For the transition from French to British subsistence elsewhere, see Darlene Balkwill and Stephen L. Cumbaa, Salt Pork and Beef Again? The Diet of French and British Soldiers at the Casemate, Bastion St. Louis, Quebec, Research Bulletin 252 (Quebec: Environment Canada, 1982). Scott, “‘Such Diet,’” 86–95, 242–48; Heldman and Grange, Excavations, 1978– 1979, 231–2. White, Middle Ground, x-xi; Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63, no. 1 (2006): 9–14. White, Middle Ground, 53. Amherst to Campbell, 7 August 1761, vol. 49, 286, ap. Leake to Amherst, 6 March 1762, vol. 68, 136, ap. Campbell to Amherst, 10 March 1761, vol. 49, 25, ap. Bouquet: Memorandum for Campbell, 1 November 1760, bp, vol. 5, 92. Return of Provisions Remaining in Store at Detroit, 16 September 1761, vol. 49, 57, ap.

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16 Bouquet: Memorandum for Campbell, 1 November 1760, bp, vol. 5, 92. 17 George Croghan, “A Selection of Letters and Journals Relating to Tours in the Western Country,” in Reuben Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748-1846: A Series of Annotated Reprints of Some of the Best and Rarest Contemporary Volumes of Travel, Descriptive of the Aborigines and Social and Economic Conditions in the Middle and Far West, During the Period of Early American Settlements, vol. 1, 47–173 (New York: ams Press, 1966), 117. 18 Gladwin to Amherst, 26 October 1762, vol. 49, 126, ap. 19 May, “Mess at Mackinac,” 4. Other remains indicate that grouse, ptarmigan, plovers, gulls, terns, woodpeckers, and other species were eaten and that wild plants were consumed, such as blueberries, pin and sand cherries, plums, elderberries, grapes, and hazelnuts, among others. However, documentary evidence does not reveal who ate or procured these items. For an extensive list of flora and fauna species consumed during the period 1761–81, as represented by their archaeological remains, see Scott, “‘Such Diet,’” 99–100, 104. 20 “Langlade Papers,” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 8 (1879): 209–23 at 218; James Gorrell, “Lieut. James Gorrell’s Journal,” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 1 (1903): 24–48 at 48. 21 Alexander Henry, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories between the Years 1760 and 1776 (New York: I. Riley, 1809), 63. 22 Sterling to [?], 14 April 1762, 30 June 1762, James Sterling Letter Book, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 33, 55; Sterling to Rutherford, 15 July 1762, ibid., 55. 23 Amherst to Campbell, 11 July 1762, vol. 49, 299, ap. 24 Campbell to Bouquet, 11 December 1760, bp, vol. 5, 170. 25 Campbell to Amherst, 23 January 1761, 14 February 1761, 10 March 1761, vol. 49, 18, 19, 25, ap. 26 Campbell to Amherst, 23 January 1761, 14 February 1761, 10 March 1761, vol. 49, 17, 20, 26, ap. 27 Campbell to Bouquet, 2 December 1760, bp, vol. 5, 141; Rogers to Bouquet, 12 December 1760, bp, vol. 5, 138. 28 Return of Provisions in Store at Detroit, 10 March 1761, vol. 49, 29, ap. 29 Campbell to Amherst, 10 March 1761, 18 April 1761, 22 May 1761, 2 July 1761, 9 August 1761, vol. 49, 26, 34, 36, 41, 46, ap. 30 Return of Provisions Remaining in Store at Fort Detroit, 16 September 1761, vol. 49, 57, ap. 31 Campbell to Amherst, 18 April 1761, vol. 49, 34, ap. 32 Campbell to Amherst, 2 July 1761, 9 August 1761, vol. 49, 41, 45, ap. 33 Balfour to Amherst, 9 September 1761, vol. 49, 49, ap; Campbell to Amherst, 10 September 1761, vol. 49, 50, ap; Gladwin to Amherst, 5 November 1761, vol. 49, 58, ap. 34 Campbell to Amherst, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 62, ap; Campbell to Amherst, 10 January 1762, vol. 49, 68–70, ap.

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35 Campbell to Amherst, 18 September 1761, vol. 49, 53, ap. Return of Provisions, 16 September 1761, vol. 49, 57, ap, states that there were ten barrels of flour in the storehouse. 36 Campbell to Amherst, 18 September 1761, 10 January 1762, vol. 49, 53, 68–9, ap. 37 Campbell to Amherst, 20 April 1762, 1 June 1762, 8 June 1762, vol. 49, 81, 88, 91, ap; McConnell, A Country Between, 155; Jenkins to Gladwin, 29 July 1762, vol. 49, 200, ap; Gladwin to Amherst, 23 November 1762, vol. 49, 135, ap. 38 Campbell to Bouquet, 26 August 1762, “Bouquet Papers,” Collections of the Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan (hereafter mphc) 19 (1911): 27–295 at 162. 39 Gladwin to Amherst, 9 September 1762, vol. 49, 102, ap; Gladwin to Outposts, 27 August 1762, vol. 49, 108, 109, ap. 40 Gladwin to Amherst, 30 September 1762, 26 October 1762, vol. 49, 119, 125–6, ap. 41 Gladwin to Amherst, 30 September 1762, 26 October 1762, vol. 49, 119, 123, ap; Gladwin to Amherst, 23 November 1762, vol. 49, 134–5, ap. 42 Henry, Travels and Adventures, 63; Etherington to Amherst, 20 January 1763, vol. 49, 162–3, ap. 43 Gladwin to Amherst, 26 January 1763, 19 April 1763, 21 February 1763, vol. 49, 146, 181, 156, ap. 44 Jenkins to Gladwin, 28 March 1763, vol. 49, 202, ap. 45 24 August 1763 to 27 April 1764, Gage Warrants, vol. 7, 141, gp; Franklin B. Hough, ed., Diary of the Siege of Detroit in the War with Pontiac (Albany, ny: J. Munsell, 1860), 20. 46 Porteous to Porteous, 20 November 1763, John Porteous Papers, 1761–99, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit; Gladwin to Amherst, [?] July 1763, vol. 49, 197, ap; Amherst to Gladwin, 22 June 1763, vol. 49, 328, ap; Gladwin to Amherst, 1 November 1763, “Gladwin Manuscripts,” mphc 27 (1897): 605–80 at 675. 47 Gage to Bradstreet, 25 December 1763, gp. 48 27 August to November 1763, Gage Warrants, vol. 8, 61, gp. 49 Gage to Glazier, 19 December 1768, gp. 50 Scott, “‘Such Diet,’” 63, 72. 51 [Untitled document], vol. 49, 25, ap; Campbell to Bouquet, 21 May 1761, 1 June 1761, bp, vol. 5, 491, 517; Campbell to Amherst, 20 April 1762, vol. 49, 82, ap. 52 Campbell to Amherst, 1 June 1762, vol. 49, 88, ap. 53 Gorrell, “Lieut. James Gorrell’s Journal,” 36, 34. 54 Campbell to Amherst, 14 February 1761, vol. 49, 20, ap; Campbell to Bouquet, 2 October 1761, bp, vol. 5, 816; Campbell to Amherst, 18 September 1761, 8 November 1761, 2 July 1761, 20 April 1762, vol. 49, 52, 62, 82, ap. 55 Amherst to Campbell, 23 November 1761, 7 August 1761, 21 March 1762, vol. 49, 289, 286, 295, ap.

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56 Campbell to Amherst, 21 June 1762, vol. 49, 96, ap; McConnell, A Country Between, 156. 57 A List of Vessels on the Different Lakes in North America, vol. 65, 109, ap; Advantages arising from keeping up Armed Vessels on the Lakes in North America, Townshend Papers, Box 8, Bundle 31. 58 Monkton to Rogers, 19 October 1760, bp, vol. 5, 79. 59 Instructions Given to Officers Commanding at the Several Posts Depending on the Detroit, 28 April 1762, vol. 49, 87, ap. 60 Campbell to Amherst, 18 September 1761, 8 November 1761, vol. 49, 52, 63, ap. 61 Amherst to Campbell, 5 February 1762, 25 June 1762, 25 July 1762, vol. 49, 293, 298, 303, ap; Amherst to Gladwin, 24 January 1763, vol. 49, 324, ap. 62 The British occupied the posts of Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Fort Chartres in the Illinois country after 1765, but a separate supply system maintained these forts. 63 A Court of Enquiry held by order of Major Gladwin to take down the report of Lieutenant Robinson concerning the sounding of Lake St Clair and the Entrances into the River Huron being sent there for that purpose, 3 September 1762, vol. 49, 111, ap; Gladwin to Amherst, 21 February 1763, 20 April 1763, vol. 49, 157, 176, ap. 64 Campbell to Gage, 3 October 1764, gp. 65 Bruce to Gage, 15 October 1769, gp. 66 Gage to Brown, 7 April 1770, gp. 67 Gage to Stevenson, 29 July 1771, gp. 68 Campbell to Gage, 26 September 1764, gp; Bradstreet to Gage, 15 October 1764, gp; Campbell to Gage, 30 October 1764, gp; From Bradstreet, n.d., gp. 69 Bradstreet to Gage, 15 October 1764, gp. 70 Campbell to Gage, 3 October 1764, 24 October 1764, gp. 71 Gage to Campbell, 18 January 1765, gp. 72 Campbell to Gage, 25 July 1765, gp. 73 Campbell to Gage, 31 May 1765, 2 August 1765, 31 October 1765, gp. 74 Campbell to Gage, 14 October 1765, 10 April 1766, 8 May 1766, 9 May 1766, gp. 75 Gage to Campbell, 1 March 1766, gp; Gage to Bayard, 21 June 1766, 7 July 1766, gp; Complaint being made to Major Bayard, 19 July 1766, gp. 76 Goldtrap to Weir, 7 September 1766, gp. 77 Rogers to Gage, 12 February 1767, gp. 78 Turnbull to Gage, 8 April 1767, 12 May 1767, gp. 79 Turnbull to Gage, 8 April 1767, 28 April 1767, gp. 80 Gage to Turnbull, 29 June 1767, 20 July 1767, gp. 81 Turnbull to Gage, 6 June 1767, 14 June 1767, 21 June 1767, gp. 82 Turnbull to Gage, 9 February 1767, 12 May 1767, gp. 83 Gage to Turnbull, 29 June 1767, gp.

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84 Turnbull to Gage, 18 August 1767, 11 November 1767, [?] September 1767, gp. 85 Turnbull to Gage, 25 April 1768, 24 July 1768, gp. 86 Gage to Turnbull, 30 May 1768, 6 June 1768, gp. 87 Turnbull to Gage, 28 August 1768, gp. 88 Turnbull to Gage, 22 October 1768, 20 June 1768, gp. 89 Gage to Turnbull, 19 December 1768, 22 February 1769, gp. 90 Bruce to Gage, 15 October 1769, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 23 September 1770, gp; Stevenson to Gage, 3 September 1770, 19 July 1771, gp. 91 Stevenson to Gage, 5 September 1771, gp. 92 Campbell to Gage, 24 October 1764, 10 November 1764, gp; Report of Work done at Fort Detroit, 31 October 1765, gp; Bassett to Gage, 24 December 1772, gp. 93 Turnbull to Gage, 21 June 1770, gp; Turnbull to Maxwell, 27 October 1770, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 18 September 1770, 12 May 1771, 23 September 1771, gp; Vattas to Gage, 16 May 1773, gp. See also Grange, Excavations, 1980–1982, 22–4. 94 Amherst to Gladwin, 9 September 1763, vol. 49, 347, ap. 95 Howard to Bradstreet, 22 April 1765, gp. 96 Rogers to Gage, 12 February 1767, gp. 97 Deidrich Brehm, Plan of the Fort of Detroit, 1760, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, reprinted in Brian Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 52; Gladwin to Amherst, 20 April 1763, vol. 49, 176, ap. 98 Campbell to Gage, 27 April 1765, 10 July 1765, 21 May 1765, 27 April 1765, gp. 99 Magra map, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, reprinted in Lyle M. Stone, Fort Michilimackinac, 1715–1781: An Archaeological Perspective on the Revolutionary Frontier (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1974), 9. 100 Nordberg Map, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Reprinted in Stone, Fort Michilimackinac, 10. 101 Campbell to Gage, 3 October 1764, gp. 102 Gage to Stevenson, 28 September 1770, gp; McDougal to Gage, 29 March 1771, gp. 103 Scott, “‘Such Diet,’” 147. 104 “The Narrative of Peter Pond,” in Charles M. Gates, ed., Five Fur Traders of the Northwest, Being the Narrative of Peter Pond and the Diaries of John Macdonell, Archibald N. McLeod, Hugh Faries, and Thomas Connor, 11–59 (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1965), 32; Milo M. Quaife, ed., The John Askin Papers (Detroit: Burton Historical Library Commission, 1928), vol. 1, 50–8; Scott, “‘Such Diet,’” 147. Scattered accounts with the military can be found in Memorandum Book of John Askin, 1766, and Inventory of John Askin’s

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105 106 107 108

109

110 111 112 113

114

115 116 117

118 119 120

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Estate, 31 December 1778, John Askin Papers, F474, ms 536, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Gage Account Book, vols 2, 3, 8–9, and 19–20, gp. Robert Callendar, Proposals for Victualling His Majesty’s Troops, 12 February 1766, gp. Turnbull to Gage, 1 September 1766, gp. David A. Armour, ed., Treason? At Michilimackinac: The Proceedings of a General Court Martial Held at Montreal in October 1768 for the Trial of Major Robert Rogers (Michigan: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1967), 91, 92. Rogers to Gage, 12 February 1767, gp; William L. Clements, ed., “Roger’s Michilimackinac Journal,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 28 (1918): 224–73 at 244–5. Howard to Gage, 12 June 1765, gp. Campbell to Gage, 25 August 1765, gp. Dunnigan, Necessity of Regularity, 55, 4. See, for example, George S. May, ed., The Doctor’s Secret Journal by Daniel Morison, Surgeon’s Mate (Michigan: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1960), 45. Gage to Glazier, 17 March 1769, 20 November 1769, gp; Gage to Hillsborough, 4 March 1769, in Clarence Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage and the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), vol. 1, 219. Glazier to Gage, 20 November 1769, gp; Grange, Excavations, 1980–1982, 20–3; Dunnigan, Necessity of Regularity, 62–3. 1Campbell to Gage, 3 October 1764, 18 October 1764, 10 November 1764, 30 June 1765, gp. John Porteous, “Journal from Schenectady to Michilimackinac and the Channels, 1765 and 1766,” in Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records, no. 33 (1939): 75–98 at 88, 88n3; Gage to Turnbull, 29 June 1767, gp. Gage to Turnbull, 22 February 1768, gp. Gage to Shelburne, 23 December 1766, in Carter, ed., Correspondence, 117; May, ed., Doctor’s Secret Journal, 7. Gage to Johnson, 10 October 1768, gp; Gage to Wilkins, 11 October 1768, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 27 June 1771, gp; From Turnbull, 9 September 1769, in James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany, ny: University of the State of New York, 1951), vol. 7, 159. Bruce to Gage, 15 October 1769, gp; Gage to Turnbull, 22 February 1768, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 25 April 1768, gp; Gage to Stevenson, 29 July 1771, gp. 122 Robison to Basset, 3 July 1773, in “Haldimand Papers,” mphc 19 (1911): 296–675 at 306–7. From Bradstreet, 31 August 1764, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 29 June 1770, gp. Turnbull to Gage, 29 June 1770, 31 July 1770, gp; Gage to Turnbull, 10 September 1770, gp.

In the King’s Service 125 126 127 128 129 130

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132 133 134 135 136 137

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Turnbull to Gage, 25 April 1768, 23 February 1768, gp. Turnbull to Gage, 10 April 1768, gp. Campbell to Gage, 31 October 1765, gp. Report of Work Done at Fort Detroit, 31 October 1765, gp. Gage to Campbell, 1 March 1766, gp. From Turnbull, 16 April 1768, gp; Gage to Bruce, 6 August 1770, gp; Gage to Turnbull, 10 September 1770, gp; Stevenson to Gage, 14 December 1770, 18 December 1770, 25 June 1771, gp; Gage to Hillsborough, 3 September 1771, in Carter, ed., Correspondence, 307. [?] to Campbell, 7 August 1766, in H.S. Bartholomew, ed., “Miscellaneous Documents,” mphc 8 (1907): 449–669 at 463; Campbell to Gage, 7 August 1766, gp. Turnbull to Gage, 17 February 1767, gp. Gage to Turnbull, 2 May 1767, 1 June 1767, 3 September 1767, gp; Turnbull to Gage, 14 October 1767, gp. Turnbull to Gage, 23 February 1768, gp. Bruce to Gage, 1 June 1770, gp; Gage to Stevenson, 2 October 1771, gp. White, Middle Ground, 257, 259. Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63, 1 (2006): 53–80; White, “Creative Misunderstandings,” 10.

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Social History

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13 Samson Occom Mohegan Leader, Christian Shaman, and Christian Sachem d av i d j . n o r t o n

A notice of death in the Connecticut Gazette of New London, 2 August 1792, stated: Died at New Stockbridge in the vicinity of Oneida, in the 69th year of his age, the Rev. Samson Occom, in a very sudden and unexpected manner … On Sunday the 15th inst., his remains were decently interred – previous to which the Rev. Mr. Kirkland preached his funeral sermon … Upwards of 300 Indians from different tribes attended. Mr. Occom was of the Mohegan tribe of Indians and removed with a number of that tribe a few years since to Oneida.1

In his diary entry of 16 July 1792, the Reverend Samuel Kirkland described the scene: The Indians were so alarmed at the sudden death of Mr. Occom that they began to collect at Tuscarora from the various settlements very early in the morning … many of the Indians came the distance of ten miles. After an exhortation and a prayer at the house of the deceased, we moved about a mile to a bower near the center of the town, for the sake of convenience, there being no house sufficiently large to contain one half of the Indians assembled on the occasion.2

These statements reflect the degree to which this Mohegan convert to Christianity, originally from Connecticut, had been accepted by the Indians among whom he had settled after the American Revolution.3 He brought with him a collection of Christian Native refugees from New England and established the new community of Brothertown. Others, such as Mr Robert Clelland, a non-Native teacher and fellow resident at

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Mohegan during Occom’s ministry there, had not been so supportive. Occom’s response to Clelland reflected his self-confidence in the face of Clelland’s low estimation of Occom’s abilities due to his Native heritage: You are continually writing tattle-tales [about me] … You signify as it was in your power to do me harm – you have been trying all you can and you may try your worst … You need not write to me any more for I will not answer your letters; I won’t waste my time and paper about them. If you have anything to say at any time, say it by word of mouth. I am, sir, just what you please, Samson Occom.4

Based on his numerous extant sermons, letters, and diary entries, studies of Occom’s life have generally followed two trains of thought. On the one hand, his story has been used to illustrate either the success or failure of eighteenth-century missionaries to convert and civilize the Indians of New England, some of whom were unable or unwilling to be assimilated into the increasingly dominant European social fabric of colonial North America. By focusing on Occom’s religious conversion, some biographers have granted him a fair degree of success in converting his own people.5 However, others have emphasized his failure to realize the material affluence and social prestige that, he perceived, his contemporary white Christian clergy enjoyed.6 On the other hand, it has been argued that Occom’s success lay in his being an intermediary between the Indian and white worlds, either as a spiritual or cultural broker.7 Occom personally accepted Christianity and made it his primary concern to promote its contribution to the welfare of Indian people. Should historians today aim primarily to assess Puritanism by examining a convert’s material success and adoption of the culture that accompanied the new faith, or should they rather study the Native convert’s accommodations to this faith that enabled its continuing influence within his or her birth culture? The significance of Occom’s ministry as a Christian preacher, inventive educator, and cultural intermediary is not complete without greater appreciation for his contribution as a political leader. This role involved more than providing hospitality to visitors, which was part of his missionary duties, as it included ongoing service on the Mohegan tribal council, which began during his youth and extended into future leadership in his peoples’ land negotiations.8 Occom was equally a Christian sachem and a Christian shaman. Sachems and shamen were different individuals in traditional Mohegan society and will be studied as such in this paper; however, Occom’s genius was to combine them as aspects of his individual service to his people.

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When Occom was born in 1732, it is unlikely that his parents would have remotely anticipated the journey that he would take through life. Writing when forty-five years of age, he reminisced that he “was born a heathen and brought up in heathenism” until he attended the school of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a Puritan9 divine who saw it as his mission to educate and civilize Indian youth by housing and educating them at his residence. During his four years as Wheelock’s student, he frequently visited and attended services at the Indian praying towns in New England, pleased to experience the happiness and friendliness of the Native Christians.10 Upon leaving Wheelock’s school in 1748 at the age of twenty-five, Occom was invited by the Montauk11 of Long Island, who for centuries had been in close contact with the Mohegan, to teach school and hold services in their communities since he had previously visited them during his years with Wheelock. For the next twelve years, he stayed in their villages, married a Montauk, Mary Fowler, began a family of twelve children, and was ordained into the Presbyterian ministry. The 1760s was a tumultuous decade for Occom. Between 1761 and 1763 he and his brother-in-law, David Fowler, were sent as teacher and missionary to the Oneida Nation in New York. This was a successful period in his life; Wheelock reported that the Tuscarora, refugee relations of the Iroquois who in the 1720s were granted Oneida land on which to settle, presented Occom with a wampum belt signifying their “perpetual love and friendship.”12 Occom travelled to Britain in 1764 to raise funds for Wheelock’s school and to advance the cause of educating Native students. He was welcomed as a celebrity in British church circles of all denominations. However, when Occom returned and lived in Mohegan, a rift developed between himself and Wheelock, the latter jealous of the Indian preacher’s popularity in Britain and the former convinced that the proceeds raised were being spent for the benefit of white students to the exclusion of the Indians. In the late 1760s Occom sank into depression: his eldest son had become a delinquent, his wife was in poor health, his house had not been completed, he felt grossly underpaid, he verged on becoming an alcoholic, and he was involved in a bitter confrontation with the local teacher, Clelland. His fortunes changed in 1771 when he was asked by Moses Paul, a Mohegan condemned to hang for the murder of a man while in a drunken rage, to preach at his execution. Occom’s sermon, eloquently denouncing the evil effects of alcohol, was quickly published and frequently reprinted.13 At the same time, Occom composed and collected hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs that became popular soon after publication.14 His last great endeavour, undertaken with an enthusiasm that exudes from his diary, was the migration of Christian Indians from Connecticut

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to their new home on Oneida land in upper New York. He made his first trip to their territory with David Fowler in July 1774, but the American Revolution prevented immediate settlement. In the spring of 1784 he led the first group of migrants to the village named Brothertown.15 Occom had shown no inclination to retire before he died at the age of sixty-nine. It was reported that he was doing what he enjoyed as a means of relaxation: “having been accustomed, in early life, to the manufacture of pails and copper wire, he returned to this employment in his old age, as his leisure and strength would permit.”16 As Occom reflected on his childhood and early teenage years, he considered with a critical eye those Mohegan economic, religious, and educational values and practices on which he had been raised. His youth was spent, he claimed, “in heathenism.” His parents “lived a wandering life,” as was Mohegan custom, earning a living from hunting, fishing, and fowling. Their only connection with the English was to “traffic with them for their small trifles.” Preachers would visit the area on alternate weeks, but the Mohegan “strictly maintained and followed their heathenish ways,” deigning to attend autumn sessions to receive the blankets rather than the Gospel. The Mohegans’ disdain for Christianity was matched by their avoidance of European educational opportunities. Occom remembered that when he was ten, a white man circulated among Mohegan wigwams encouraging children to learn the alphabet. This was probably how Occom was introduced to his later love for literary pursuits. However, in other ways the young Mohegan’s “heathenism” included a lifestyle devoid of European interest in farming, husbandry, permanent housing, and use of the English language.17 The Mohegan Nation into which Occom was born had been in contact with the Europeans since the sixteenth century. Their ancestors were part of the Delaware (Lenni-Lenape) who emigrated eastward at that time from their homeland in the Ohio Valley to live among their relations in New England. The similarity of their patterns of daily living and belief systems to those of the neighbouring Montauk of eastern Long Island allowed for a close affinity between these two groups in the Connecticut River Valley, especially when compared to the significant differences in language and social customs existing between these and other New England nations.18 When war prevailed between the Mohegan and their Pequot relatives in 1637, the MoheganEuropean alliance proved far from beneficial for the Mohegan, as their territory in subsequent years was methodically eaten away by land-hungry colonists. A spate of laws, enacted by the Connecticut courts in the latter 1600s, aimed at keeping Indians economically and socially separated from white society. Such laws reflected the animosity

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felt by the colonial settlers. Indians in Connecticut were not allowed to carry guns or enter white homes, could be shot if found near a white village at night, and were forbidden to trade for firewood or alcohol with a white person.19 Puritan abhorrence of shamanistic activity was also evident in New England society. Indians willing in 1647 to organize themselves as a praying town in Massachusetts were liable to hefty fines should they act as or seek the ministrations of a shaman. This attitude existed in Connecticut a century later; Wheelock was determined to rescue his Native students from the shaman’s “savage and sordid practices.”20 Indian-colonist friction could explain the Mohegan’s lengthy history of rejecting Puritan missionary advances in favour of maintaining their traditional spirituality. Indian groups in New England had been influenced by missionary enterprise since the efforts of John Eliot in the mid-seventeenth century to set aside separate praying towns for Christian converts in Massachusetts. His efforts appeared to be successful; fourteen of these towns were established there between 1651 and 1675.21 However, enthusiasm among Indians in Connecticut did not keep pace. Missionaries were forbidden entrance into Mohegan territory following the Mohegan-Pequot war for fear that they would disrupt the consolidation of the new Mohegan regime. Experience Mayhew failed in 1713 to establish a mission school among the Mohegan on behalf of the New England Company affiliated with the Church of England. He reported that Mohegan excuses for not adopting Christian worship were based on the inappropriate behaviour of white Christians when under the influence of alcohol.22 Occom’s conversion to Christianity in 1739, including his venturing into white congregations, was a spirited move considering the longstanding tension between Connecticut Indians and colonists. For the teenage Mohegan, the white man’s religion brought answers to a troubled soul that had not been found elsewhere. When I was sixteen years of age, we heard a Strange Rumour among the English, that there were Extraordinary Ministers Preaching from Place to Place … Sometime in the Summer … some Ministers began to visit us and Preach the Word of God … I was one that was Imprest with the things we had heard. These Preachers did not only come to us, but we frequently went [to] their meetings and Churches. After I was awakened and converted, I went to all the meetings I could come at … And when I was seventeen years of age had, as I trust, a Discovery of the way of Salvation through Jesus Christ, and was enabl’d to put my trust in him alone for Life and Salvation. From this Time the Distress and Burden of my mind was removed, and I found Serenity and Pleasure of Soul in Serving God.23

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Presumably, the “extraordinary ministers” who stirred the interests of the Mohegan were those who had themselves subscribed to the enthusiastic evangelism of the Great Awakening. The movement’s beginnings have been attributed, in part, to the Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts Jonathan Edwards, whose emotional sermons in the mid-1730s emphasized the “corruption of human nature, the fury of divine wrath and the need for immediate repentance.” The Presbyterian cleric Gilbert Tennent and Congregationalist James Davenport also became involved, and new enthusiasm energized the movement in 1739 with the arrival from Britain of the charismatic Methodist George Whitefield. These men travelled extensively throughout New England, replacing the somber intellectualism of Puritan Christianity with a more joyful, emotional, and spontaneous expression of the faith. Eleazar Wheelock, the Congregationalist pastor at Lebanon, Connecticut, joined the team of revivalists traversing New England. Occom’s arrival as the first Native student at Wheelock’s school in 1743, and his subsequent four-year sojourn there, provided him with an opportunity to deepen his appreciation of the Great Awakening, which glimmered within him during the years between his conversion and his formal studies.24 As a religious leader of the Mohegan who subscribed to Christian teachings, there were aspects of shamanism that Occom rejected.25 He distanced himself from the shamen who, as he wrote, “got their art from the devil” and whose “witchcraft [was] a great mystery of darkness.” The abundance of gods and spirits, both good and evil, that were considered to influence Mohegan life were of no significance to the converted Occom. In 1761 he wrote that both the Mohegan and Montauk acknowledged “a great number of gods … there was one god over their wigwams, another of the fire, another over the sea, another of the wind, another of the day, four gods over four parts of the year … They had a notion of one great and good god that was over all the rest of the gods.”26 There was also a vast array of evil spirits, many of whom would reveal themselves in dreams and visions as frequently as would the good spirits. Mohegan spirituality saw personal endeavour as a response to the good and evil spirits. The shaman would communicate with these spirits, interpret dreams and omens, and through his powers enable members of the community to better their lot in life by aligning themselves with the wills of the beneficent spirit world.27 Occom’s personal conversion brought him into a direct relationship with a living God that rendered the spirit world unnecessary. In his diary he paid no heed to dreams and omens; in his sermons he encouraged listeners to develop their own faith in the one God who would bring meaning to their lives.

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In the conclusion of his sermon to Moses Paul, he urged the need for his people to turn from sin and to “become as rational creatures.” Improvement for the Mohegan and other Indians was not dangled in front of them by capricious spirits but was available to those who chose to accept the blessings available through God’s grace. In the same way, Occom rejected the shaman’s preoccupation with messages given through seasonal and meteorological phenomena.28 In his diary he constantly referred to weather conditions but used this information to stress his responsibility to perform the work of God despite any inconvenience caused by inclement weather or the associated folklore that persisted among his people. In Occom’s opinion, the control that these traditional customs maintained over his people, together with an individual’s resultant preoccupation with attempting to interpret God’s messages through portents and other phenomena, served as a distraction in their progress toward a relationship with the Divine. Some proponents of Puritanism encouraged ordinary people to have “sympathy for ideas originating in the occult sciences” and to discover the action of God in “a blend of apocolypse [sic], astrology, nature and Greek meteorology,” but Occom rejected these methods.29 Occom’s writings revealed an awareness that other elements of Puritanism complemented the role of shaman. The intensity of commitment expected of a shaman by a Native community matched Occom’s conversion experience and his resulting desire to serve others. Occom himself wrote: I had, as I trust, a Discovery of the Way of Salvation through Jesus Christ … I found Serenity and Pleasure of Soul in serving God … [and] an uncommon Pity and Compassion to my poor Brethren According to the Flesh.30

His friend who preached at his ordination in 1759, the Reverend Samuel Buell, wrote that Occom “found within himself a bleeding tenderness of heart and unutterable bowels of compassion towards [his] people.”31 Intending his sermon to the condemned Moses Paul to be heard by Native people, Occom urged Now let me Exhort you all … take warning by this doleful sight before us … Let us all reform our lives … Let us be persuaded that we are accountable creatures to God … You that have been careless all your days, now awake to righteousness and be concerned for your poor and never dying souls.32

By addressing individuals, his sermons reflected both Puritanism’s stress on personal conversion and the ministrations of a shaman who,

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by ministering on an individual basis, brought the ameliorating effects to the wider tribal community.33 From his traditional background, Occom understood the connection between healing and salvation, as both concepts were rooted in the need for restoration to wholeness. His determination to convince his hearers of their own and their community’s need for healing was evident in his sermons and his selection of hymns. The ponderous themes of sin’s penalties and hell’s terrors, predominant in the hymns that he wrote, were true to his Puritan training, which emphasized the centrality of the new birth experience: Awak’d by Sinai’s awful sound My soull in guilt and thrall I found, And knew not where to go; O’erwhelmed with sin, with anguish slain, The sinner must be born again, Or sink to endless woe.34

These graphic verbal descriptions also reflected the ecstatic actions of a shaman. He adapted a shaman’s external rites – strange gestures, eerie sounds, and numerous paraphernalia that struck terror into listeners – and internalized them as would a Puritan preacher, using vivid verbal images and impassioned speech to effect a “cure.” Similarly, his interest in natural medicines, acquired from his Indian heritage, supported his Puritan theology: in many diary entries he advocated the use of Native medicines accompanied by Christian prayer.35 Whether the ecstatic elements of native spirituality and the emotionalism of Puritan worship were mutually reinforced in Occom’s mind is questionable. It is difficult to determine whether the Mohegan was aware of the average New England colonist’s interest in and openness to supernatural portents and manifestations.36 Certainly, the dour atmosphere of Wheelock’s school, where Occom encountered his longest exposure to Calvinism, did not reflect the spontaneous enthusiasm associated with the Puritan revival.37 His appeal during his visit to England was based on his simplicity and sincerity when preaching, traits commonly cultivated among revivalists, and on an approach similar to that employed later in his sermon for Moses Paul. Englishmen in the audience may have been attracted to the novelty of seeing and hearing an Indian preach, but Occom did not emphasize his Native identity; in fact, it was with some reluctance and to placate an English notable that Occom requested that Wheelock send him some Native paraphernalia, none of which had particular spiritual significance.38 Taking into account his dislike for previously mentioned aspects of shamanism, it

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would seem that Occom more likely saw his style of ministry as primarily an affirmation of his new faith. Occom’s frequent encounters with alcohol, occurring in his periods of depression, created friction with his ecclesiastical authorities, who railed against his collapse in maintaining the moral rectitude required of a Puritan minister. In the late 1760s he apologized to his clerical superiors for having occasionally “been overtaken with strong drink” and in so doing having “greatly wounded the cause of God” and “blackened [his] own soul.”39 It also endangered his credibility as a religious leader among the Indians, especially as it was from the curse of alcohol that he so vehemently attempted to release them. He also would have been conscious that a positive moral character was essential to a shaman’s continuing role and respect in an Indian community. A shaman lived physically apart from his people so as not to be infected by the evil that might present itself there, yet he faced constant public scrutiny by the community to ensure that his rectitude was maintained.40 Occom’s mentor Wheelock would not let the matter rest, and the problem exacerbated the growing rift between the two. However, Occom’s eventual sobriety grew from his awareness of the expectations placed on him by his people in his role as shaman as much as, if not more than, from the expectations of his Puritan contemporaries concerning his role as preacher.41 Occasionally Occom’s understanding of himself as a shamanistic leader conflicted with Christian teachings that he rejected in favour of maintaining his traditional beliefs. One problematic area concerned the cardinal sin of Puritanism: pride. Puritan teaching stressed the necessity for individuals to acknowledge their dependence on God’s gift of grace; if this awareness was lacking, Satan could vault their selfimage to the point where the need for grace was eliminated. Evidence of pride in a person’s life indicated that he or she was not in a right relationship with God. Occom’s detractors denounced what they perceived as his pride with a regularity that matched their condemnation of his alcohol abuse. When angered by Occom’s independent actions, Wheelock would refer to “that Indian distemper, pride,” which made him “exceeding proud and haughty … wholly useless and nothing better than a thorn.”42 In contrast, Occom’s understanding of pride did not presume a person’s arrogance or self-exaltation but an awareness of one’s value in the totality of God’s creation. A shaman assisted persons to live in harmony with the land and the community, and in this way to be proud of their positive contribution to their society. Occom expressed “pride that in their Languages, [Indians could] not Curse or swear or take God’s Name in vain in their own Tongue.” When Joseph Johnson, a leading figure in the planned migration of New England

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Indians from their home communities to Oneida territory in the mid1770s, was discouraged that so few showed an interest in emigrating, Occom encouraged him to “let God’s word be [his] pride both in religious and temporal concerns.”43 In the face of increasing white economic, social, and numerical strength, the Indians’ determination to be recognized and accepted as separate nations was understandably interpreted by the Puritan missionaries as inherent and stubborn pride. Leaders of the Puritan revival reflected on their spiritual journey, both in their writings and in their sermons, by stressing their sense of sin, their fear of damnation, and their hope of salvation. George Whitefield expanded on the ordinary events of life as signs of God’s providential love, and Jonathan Edwards experienced God’s presence in the beauty of nature, yet both men wrote and spoke of the increased awareness of their fallen state in the presence of the Divine as a stimulus for their readers and hearers to repent and seek forgiveness.44 Occom, however, relied more on his Native tradition, which placed high value on oratorical excellence. His diary entries were brief, with no lengthy discourses on sin and salvation, and were not intended for public perusal. Unlike Whitefield, Occom did not publish his diaries. His sermons, on the other hand, were reported to be of considerable length, a fact exemplified by that delivered at the execution of Moses Paul. Hermeneutics for Occom provided an excellent opportunity to combine the oratorical skills of both shaman and evangelist. In similar fashion, Occom’s use of song during worship reflected the chanting and incantations of a shaman, a practice not appreciated by contemporary Puritans, who referred to the “shrieking” and “howling” of traditional practitioners. The style of worship favoured by Congregationalist ministers omitted anything that hinted of the Church of England’s elaborate style of singing and musical accompaniment. On the other hand, Mohegan culture used songs for religious ceremonies and for pleasure. Singing, drumming, and dancing augmented festivities following a successful hunt as well as the naming of a child. Occom’s frequent insertion of singing into the daily school routine would have been appreciated by his young charges. Considering the conservative nature of mainstream Puritan ceremonial, the publication of Occom’s collection of hymns and spiritual songs, notwithstanding their ponderous Christian themes, was a tribute to the contribution made by his own culture.45 To whom, then, did Occom direct his Gospel? His primary responsibility was to Indians.46 Christianity was the solution to the ache within his youthful and “heathen” soul and, as such, would assist others of his race. On occasion, he indicated that his adaptation of the faith could be of benefit to those of a different heritage. In the 1773 publication

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of his sermon to Moses Paul, Occom provided a preface, in which he expressed pleasure that his words were applicable to people other than Natives: The Common people understand but little of [high and lofty sermons]. But I think they can’t help understand my talk; little children may understand me. And poor Negroes may plainly and fully understand my meaning; and it may be of service to them. Again, it may in a particular manner be serviceable to my poor kindred the Indians – Further, as it comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it because it is from an Indian. God works where, and when he pleases, and by what instrument he sees fit, and he can and has used weak and unlikely instruments to bring about his great work.

Similarly, in the preface to his collection of hymns “intended for the edification of Sincere Christians,” he indicated that sources and participants extended beyond Indians; the songs came “from a number of authors of different denominations of Christianity” and were “to prepare the believer for the kingdom of God.”47 Nevertheless, Occom’s career was chiefly directed to the Mohegan and other Indian nations. His break with Wheelock can be explained as resulting not only from Occom’s belief that his teacher was misdirecting funds raised in England, but also from Occom’s understanding that this money was intended expressly for the purpose of educating Indian students. He wrote to Wheelock that his “having so many white scholars and so few or no Indian scholars [gave him] great discouragement … and [was] quite contrary to the minds of the donors.”48 The suggestion that Occom abandoned his role as intermediary and focused instead on Indians due to his disillusionment with Wheelock results from too strenuous an attempt to portray the Mohegan preacher as a victim of a failed brokerage.49 Accusations that Occom rejected a ministry within colonial society due to his inability to integrate himself into that milieu are equally shortsighted. His dissatisfaction concerning inequitable payment for his services was justified; his salary as missionary/teacher/interpreter at Montauk was far below that paid by the Society for Propagation of the Gospel (spg) to clerics whose ministry among the Indians was considerably more circumscribed. Occom concluded his autobiographical sketch by saying that this injustice was simply due to his being a “poor Indian” and that, as such, he was considered to be of lesser ability. However, these thoughts are also in keeping with Occom’s description of simple educational methods at Montauk combined with a lifestyle that incorporated living in a wigwam, growing vegetables, catching fish, binding books, and carving gunstocks. Was he bemoaning a livelihood

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lacking affluence or exalting his ability to bring Christianity to his people in ways meaningful to them? In his sermon at Moses Paul’s execution, when he claimed that alcoholic Indians “can’t have comfortable houses, not anything comfortable in [their] houses, neither food nor raiment, nor decent utensils,” was he exhorting his hearers to obtain a perceived European standard of living by righteous behaviour? Or was he preaching against the evils of wild carousing so evident among his people and from which he sincerely believed that faith in Christ could bring salvation?50 Occom’s constant refrain requesting more money to maintain his European-style house and support his growing family should not be interpreted as an implication that he “had left his wigwam origins and crossed over the cultural divide into the arms of English material culture.”51 Such viewpoints diminish Occom’s continuing ministry to his people, which enabled them to accept Christianity’s promise of release from negative aspects of life while working in harmony with numerous aspects of their traditional spirituality. An appreciation of Occom’s involvement as a sachem, as important to him as his role as a shaman, is required to provide a balanced perspective of his life. The legacy of the seventeenth-century sachem Uncas and his ability to preserve a political identity for his Mohegan Nation was still remembered during Occom’s time, despite his people’s small numbers, tribal wars, and European encroachment on Mohegan land.52 Uncas, known as the Great, had reinvigorated Mohegan morale by restoring their name to the Mohegan-Pequot union following the victory of the former over the latter in 1637.53 The ability of his successors paled in comparison, yet the Mohegan Nation rallied around them. Uncas died in 1682, and his alcoholic son Oweneco held the position as head sachem for thirty-three years. Three sons continued what had become the family tradition of drunken leaders, and the death of Ben Uncas III in 1679 marked the end of the line of hereditary sachems. As sachem, Uncas had been responsible for maintaining Mohegan possession of their ancestral lands and retaining knowledge about the rivers, hills, and forests that constituted their homeland. In so doing, Uncas established and preserved the existence of the nation.54 Ironically, while Uncas had attempted to unify the Mohegan people under his strong leadership, he had engaged in a land deal that greatly divided them. In 1636, when Connecticut colonists knew that war with the Pequot was inevitable, Major John Mason led a militia corps and accompanied Uncas in his victory over the Pequot. In 1640 Mason acquired from Uncas a major portion of his territory, 800 square miles, for 5 1/2 yards of cloth and a few pairs of stockings. This grant continued

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to create division among the Mohegan during Occom’s life. One segment of Mohegan society, including Occom, supported Ben’s cousin John Uncas, who advocated keeping Mohegan land for Mohegan people, arguing that the disputed land had not been ceded but only entrusted to the colony of Connecticut for an undetermined period of time. Although Mason’s own descendants claimed that he was acting as a trustee for the Mohegan to protect their land against unfair landgrabbing practices, some sachems who succeeded Uncas sold land to the colonists to strengthen their personal financial position, incorporating a European-style notion of land as a commodity that could be held privately as well as bought and sold.55 Others supported chief Ben Uncas III, who had advised his people to sell and rent land if it would benefit them financially, thereby gaining the support of the Connecticut Assembly, which needed more land for increasing colonial populations. Both sides debated the issue until 1767, with Mason’s family supporting Occom and those who fought unsuccessfully to maintain Mohegan ownership of their territory.56 After Uncas’s line of hereditary sachems came to an end in 1769 with the death of Ben III, the morale of the Mohegan declined, as they continued to dwindle in numbers, had no political leadership, and faced increasing loss of land by its sale to white settlers. Without any wars being conducted, as in earlier generations, from which a Native military leader could rise, the Connecticut Assembly easily imposed its wishes on the Mohegan people. Occom was keenly aware of the urgency of the situation. His mother, Sarah, was a direct descendant of the original Uncas, and his paternal grandfather had been loyal to him. In 1742, at age nineteen, Occom and his father Joshua were named by Chief Ben Uncas II to a tribal “council of 12” comprised of individuals who supported his position of keeping Mohegan lands intact. Occom had also been born into the wolf clan and was thus expected to possess and develop qualities of leadership and decision making.57 Occom made his position regarding Mohegan land quite clear. In 1750 his signature accompanied those of other council members who unsuccessfully requested that the Connecticut Assembly ratify their choice of a chief who would protect Mohegan lands.58 When Occom travelled to England in 1764, Wheelock was aware of the depth of Occom’s commitment to Mohegan land issues but was relieved to hear that the Indian “had done nothing to revive, encourage or move forward that suit notwithstanding [Wheelock] supposed the Indians had been much wronged in the affair.” Some friends of Wheelock expressed doubts about his decision to send the Mohegan preacher to England in search of funds in Britain and cautioned him to request that Occom “keep quite clear of the Mason affair or he [would] bring

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an old tangle about [his] ears,” especially as a relative of Mason was living in England and could be sought out by Occom. On the part of those concerned, the relief was palpable that nothing of the Mason controversy was aired in Britain.59 Tensions flared in 1769 at the death of Ben Uncas III. In 1725 a law approved by the Connecticut Assembly had placed all Indian affairs under its aegis, including a tribe’s selection of sachems and councillors. Consequently, in 1750 the Assembly had duly ratified the Mohegan’s choice of Ben Uncas III. At the time of his death, however, Occom and other Mohegan representatives chafed against this restrictive legislation and agitated for greater tribal autonomy. As a result, the Assembly had struck a committee to meet with the Mohegan to forestall any disagreements that could occur concerning the installation of a sachem.60 Ben III died before the committee had completed its work, and the Assembly, assuming its legal control of the sachem’s funeral, made the mistake of appointing the Reverend Jewett as the officiant for the funeral. Four years earlier, Occom had tried to remove Jewett from his teaching position at Mohegan, angry that the man was supporting the residents who advocated land sales. At that time, white authorities feared Occom would stir up the Mason controversy, but despite his not doing so, suspicions lingered.61 In planning Uncas’s funeral, the Assembly decided that the deceased chief should be buried in the white cemetery at Norwich. An observer reported that “before divine service was over, Samson Occom withdrew and went out and was soon followed by others of his tribe,” insisting with eventual success that the chief be buried “in Mohegan on their own land.” He also disclosed that “Samson Occom and other leading men [were] conspiring against the government” to prevent its candidate, Ben’s son Isaiah, from being installed as the next sachem.62 When the Assembly called a meeting at Mohegan the day after the funeral to settle their choice of sachem, Occom held a separate meeting at his home with his supporters, declaring a freeze on negotiations until the land issue had been settled. The Assembly added to the impasse by refusing to recognize anyone as sachem as long as strife existed in the community.63 Occom continued to provide leadership in this debate. Discussions were reinstituted and held spasmodically between the Connecticut Assembly and the Mohegan until, in 1771, the absence of a sachem and division among the Mohegan enabled the Assembly to gain control over Mohegan land. Occom’s opinion, although somewhat over stated, was prophetic: The grand controversy which has subsided between the Colony of Conn. and the Mohegan Indians, above seventy years, is finally decided in favour of the

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colony. I am afraid the poor Indians will never stand a good chance with the English in their land controversies, because they are very poor, they have no money. Money is almighty now-a-days, and the Indians have no learning, no art, no cunning; the English have all.64

Despite this setback, Occom persevered. In the absence of a sachem, he worked with Mohegan members to establish a working relationship with the Assembly that in 1774 resulted in a system whereby the Mohegan cooperated with a body of overseers chosen by the Assembly to administer the rental and distribution of Mohegan land and to settle related disputes. This compromise position on the part of Occom did not meet with everyone’s approval; a Mohegan opponent wrote: Affairs are growing worse ever since Occom has come home. He is determined to have the ordering of all the Indian concerns, especially the rent of our lands, and he says let the Assembly do what it please he will break it all to pieces in spite of them … His company flings down fences and lets cattle into our fields whereby our corn is destroyed.65

These events, happening in the early 1770s, coincided with Occom’s preparations to lead his supporters to their new home in Oneida territory. However, the preliminaries to, and the outbreak of, the Revolution forced a postponement of those plans. Conscious of his responsibility as sachem to prepare future generations for life in the white world, Occom promoted his adaptation of European-style education. When he taught at Montauk, he modified the style of instruction encountered at Wheelock’s home. Rejecting the competitive and rigid routine that he had experienced there, Occom created a model for his students that reflected his preference for his own Native traditions. After prayer, students sat in a circle, helping one another when difficulties arose. The routine included visits from parents, encouraging talks by elders, and outings for fishing and fowling. Much of the day was interspersed with song and prayer. Unfortunately, Occom left no personal reflections about his use of English in his school. Since his students came from different language groups, it may have served to facilitate their mutual understanding as well as to prepare them for life in an increasingly white world. His later experience with the Connecticut Assembly while at Mohegan supported his conviction that facility in English was a necessity for Indians to make headway in disputes with colonial authorities. In addition, his position as a missionary teacher in Native society allowed him further opportunities; as well as “keeping the school,” he “carried on the religious meetings as often as ever, and attended the sick and their funerals, and

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did what writings they wanted, and often sat as a judge to reconcile and decide their matters between them.”66 His often-critical mentor, Wheelock, recognized Occom’s leadership potential, particularly when the Tuscarora presented Occom with a wampum belt. Consequently, Wheelock requested that he help the Tuscarora to establish a school, curtail the availability of alcohol, and protect their lands.67 It was at Brothertown that Occom had an opportunity to ensure spiritual health and political stability for the Mohegan and the other New England tribes who migrated with them. Although he was not chosen as shaman or appointed as sachem, he functioned in both capacities but did so as a Christian. He had the support of his people in his endeavours as a shaman to model the town on spiritual principles and as a sachem to supply the inhabitants with an adequate territorial and economic base. With Brothertown residents recognizing his spiritual leadership, Occom was able to minister with a new freedom and enthusiasm. Although he mentioned the school at Brothertown in his diary, he did not refer to the method or content of his teaching; similarly, he provided little detail about his sermons. By this time of his life, the Christian Indians who moved to Brothertown would have been quite familiar with and supportive of his style; criticism or support from the colonial authorities was of less consequence to him now. A letter from Native residents of neighbouring New Stockbridge written in 1787 indicated that they also valued Occom’s ministry, asking him to serve among them as well as to the people of Brothertown. They believed that God had raised him as an “Ambassador in the wilderness … [to be] the first instrument to stir up [their] own nation to try and embrace the whole religion.” In support of this conviction, they pledged to provide for Occom’s material needs if he would minister to them “in conjunction with Brothertown.”68 By 1789 Occom had moved his family to New Stockbridge, having travelled on horseback and ministered along the 400 mile trail between Mohegan and Brothertown in the intervening years.69 Despite increasing age and ill health, he frequently preached three times on Sunday to both white and Indian congregations as invited. Occom’s willingness to serve wherever requested placed him within the tradition of itinerant Puritan preachers who challenged conservative denominations by disregarding parish boundaries; it also modified the custom of shamen to practice their rites primarily within the villages where they resided.70 Although the Brothertown residents were committed to establishing their new church, a shortage of available funds forced Occom to seek

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financial help outside the community. In 1785, as he travelled to New York for this purpose, he carried a letter from his congregation stating that he was an “eminent instrument of God” who was helping them in their “indispensable duty to maintain the Christian religion” and “to be independent as fast as [they could].”71 In the autumn of 1791 he wrote to the Albany Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church stating that the Brothertown residents had “willingly and cheerfully” created the “first Indian Presbyterian Church that ever was formed by the Indians themselves, for [they] had no white man to assist [them] when [they] formed.”72 Although Occom made brief references in his diary to baptisms that he performed prior to his services at Brothertown, the detail that he provided concerning a ceremony that he conducted in the community possibly indicated his experience of freedom and renewed invigoration at this point in his ministry. When visiting a family near the village, he stayed for supper and then held a prayer service for the family and their neighbours. In what could well have been a revival at which some had a conversion experience, he concluded with an unplanned baptism, as “many confessed and lamented their past conduct and determined to live a regular life.”73 He had previously mentioned the elaborate preparations involved in the traditional naming ceremony of children at Montauk and Mohegan: choice of gifts by the community, bestowal of a name by the elders, provision of an animal spirit guide, and the shaman’s burial of the umbilical cord as a gift to Mother Earth and a reminder of human mortality. It also involved a feast provided by the community. At a later date, as adults, they could change their names as circumstances necessitated.74 In contrast to naming ceremonies, Occom’s baptismal rite on this occasion was more spontaneous and uncomplicated, similar in style to others that he had performed previously. Although Occom’s Puritan revivalism emphasized new-birth experience and shared with shamanism a desire to bring all individuals into communal fellowship, Occom stressed that a name bestowed at baptism was permanent, reflecting the life-long commitment to Christianity that was expected of the convert. Occom’s diary references to weddings that he performed at Brothertown reveal his desire to maintain the social and communal aspects of the weddings that he had encountered in New England as conducted by shamen, but with an added emphasis on the permanence and sacredness of the marriage vows as befitted a Puritan understanding of the ceremony. In the traditional culture with which Occom was familiar, infant marriages were common, with the father of the male baby taking gifts of skins and blankets to the family of the female baby. At maturity, the couple could live together or choose other companions if they preferred.

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Young couples could also publicly announce their intention to share a home, hold a community feast, and be considered husband and wife. A man’s accepting a woman’s basket of baked goods indicated that he received her as his wife.75 Occom perceived that his position at Brothertown was secure, so he provided an account of a wedding in the community that was far more detailed than his previous entries. Many aspects of the Christian ceremony maintained the communal atmosphere familiar in his tradition: all came to the house in procession, families and visitors were seated according to their age, and speeches were delivered, a meal shared, and the evening spent in singing and socializing. However, in his sermon on this occasion, he stressed Christian teachings of marriage: its permanence, its sacredness, and the mutual honour and respect expected of the couple by God, who blessed their union.76 In his role as clergyman, Occom was far more involved in the marriage ceremony than was the shaman at a traditional naming ceremony, and weddings provided Occom with the opportunity to augment the shaman’s function by teaching the Christian understanding of commitment to family and community relationships. In Occom’s experience of traditional funerals conducted by shamen, community women with blackened faces wailed with “doleful and loud lamentations” while washing the deceased’s body, the home was immediately dismantled, the person’s name was not uttered until a successor was found for that name, and the fate of the departed’s soul was uncertain.77 However, at a funeral at Brothertown recorded in his diary, Occom focused on the tears of the bereaved, the solemnity of the service, and the community fellowship that followed. His Biblical text emphasized the opportunities given by God for the believer to form a faithful relationship with Him in this life. The shaman’s preoccupation with death’s finality and the afterlife’s uncertainty was replaced with the Christian’s need and opportunity to experience God’s love through all the events of life.78 At this funeral, as at the execution of Moses Paul, Occom preached about the opportunity for healing and restoration in the community rather than about the hopelessness of death. In his responsibility as sachem, Occom needed to create an environment conducive to the political and economic welfare of the Brothertown residents. To accomplish this end, he utilized what he considered to be the beneficial aspects of the Puritan towns of Connecticut and the praying towns of New England while not forgetting the positive teachings within his Mohegan culture. Unlike the New England praying towns, Brothertown was to be administered by the Indian residents themselves. In 1754 Ben Uncas had obtained from the Connecticut

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Assembly a “law book for the benefit of the tribe” and had learned how to survey Mohegan land and erect fences.79 This book was taken to Brothertown, accompanied by ten of the seventeen Mohegan students who had attended Wheelock’s school and twelve families from other New England tribes.80 The knowledge of farming and of household maintenance that these former students brought to Brothertown benefited the new community and was not wasted, as Wheelock had earlier feared would be the situation when his students returned to their families.81 Using his earlier experience as a Mohegan tribal councillor and drawing on his dream of creating a self-governing Indian community, Occom was a key figure at the community organizational meetings of 1785. In forming the “Body Politick” to be named Brothertown, the residents agreed to “go in all their Public Concerns in harmony both in the religious and Temporal Concerns, and every one to bear his part in Public Charges in the Town.” They selected Mohegan individuals as town clerk, trustees, and fence viewers, with all officials elected annually.82 Although modelled after the towns of Connecticut, Brothertown would attempt to operate in a more egalitarian fashion by avoiding the hierarchical structure of colonial church meetings.83 In the establishment of Brothertown, Occom continued to act as a sachem when working to guarantee the future existence of the community by means of preserving their landholdings. Experienced in dealing with the colonial authorities of Connecticut, and preparing to face possible land renegotiations with the Oneida in New York, he brought with him to Brothertown a copy of a book published in 1769 entitled Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Colony of Connecticut in New England in America. When the Oneida agreed in 1774 to grant thirteen square miles of land to the New England Christian Indians, Occom immediately prepared to have this arrangement registered with the secretary of state for Connecticut.84 However, as the temptation to sell land increased for the Oneida after the Revolutionary War, in 1786 they attempted to revise their plan and insisted that the Brothertown Indians “live at large with them on their land.” Occom urged his people to resist this proposal, and in the 1788 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, a lesser amount of six square miles of land was reserved for the Brothertown community.85 Fearing further contested land arrangements, Occom pressed for a final survey and grant settlement, which was concluded in 1789, stating that “all that part of the tract of land, formerly given to them by the Oneida Indians, [was] included in the cession lately made by the Oneida Indians to the people of this state.”86 Occom’s struggle for land did not involve just the Oneida; some residents of Brothertown departed from their earlier convictions and

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tried to sell and lease their land to incoming white settlers against Occom’s advice. In 1791 he again travelled to New York City to make permanent the tenure of the land in the hands of Native resident trustees. By means of “an Act for the relief of the Indians Residing in Brothertown and New Stockbridge,” he formalized a system by which resident trustees were to lay out lots, lease tracts, and adjudicate cases of trespass and debt, a reflection of the compromise that he had been forced to accept earlier in Connecticut.87 This Act could not be enforced as long as white people held ten-year leases that they had earlier procured from Brothertown residents. Since Occom died in April 1792, he did not live to see the results of this arrangement: the New York General Assembly forcibly ejected whites and installed a permanent town government in Brothertown in May 1792.88 Occom’s responsibility as sachem also concerned the economic welfare of Brothertown. No longer receiving an spg stipend and now entitled to benefit from the financial health of the community, Occom oversaw the community’s fiscal development. Together they could put into practice the Puritan injunction to utilize fully the land given them by God. Occom had always maintained a family garden to augment his income, but now his horticultural efforts received greater attention. His diary entries frequently refer to the produce raised from his garden and to the income accrued from its sale. Occom’s plan for further agricultural development had received praise from his erstwhile supporter; Wheelock approved of the “removal of the principal Indians of the tribe at Montauk with all the Christianized and civilized Indians of the several towns of New England. To settle in a body in the heart of the country of the Six Nations … and to cultivate those lands for their subsistence.”89 Occom’s time at Brothertown marked the culmination of his career. His function as a religious and political leader was molded by his Mohegan culture and developed throughout his life and ministry, but by means of his Christian faith, it was also expanded so that he could provide leadership to Indians other than just the Mohegan, giving him a credibility and responsibility that extended beyond that of a traditional shaman or sachem. At a time when the Mohegan Nation was in danger of disintegration, Occom filled the void created by the absence of a sachem by acting in that capacity, and he did so by using insights and techniques adapted from his Christian faith to strengthen his position. His belief in a personal relationship with Jesus as saviour to all peoples enabled him to provide leadership to Christian Indians of neighbouring tribes. Occom’s continued acceptance and influence within his own culture is of greater significance than any perceived failure on his part to fit into the European culture that accompanied his new faith.

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notes 1 Harold Blodgett, Samson Occom (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College, 1935), 211. 2 Recorded in William Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1899), 297. 3 As Occom used the terms “Indian” and “Native” in his writing, I do the same in this chapter, realizing, however, that “Amerindian,” “indigenous,” “Aboriginal,” and “First Nation” are perhaps more in vogue today. Similarly, “white” refers to the colonists. The term “Mohegan” refers both to the Indian nation and to their central community located close to New London, Connecticut. The books by Blodgett and Love cited in the previous notes, together with Leon Richardson, An Indian Preacher in England (Hanover, nh: Dartmouth College, 1933), remain the standard biographies of Occom. Recent studies include Laurie Weinstein, “Samson Occom: A Charismatic Eighteenth Century Mohegan Leader,” in Laurie Weinstein, ed., Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, 91–102 (Westport, ct: Bergin and Garvey, 1994); Margaret Connell Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Spiritual Intermediary,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: the Cultural Broker, 61–78 (Norman, ok: Oklahoma University Press, 1994); Margaret Connell Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader and Cultural Broker,” in Ian K. Steele and Nancy Rhoden, eds, The Human Tradition in Colonial America, 237–55 (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 233–57. 4 Letter of Occom to Clelland, [?] December 1768, Wheelock Papers, Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover, New Hampshire, #768900.7. 5 Blodgett, Samson Occom, 215–16. 6 Weinstein, “Samson Occom,” 91–102; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 204. 7 Occom’s role as Christian missionary to his people is emphasized by Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Spiritual,” 61–78. 8 R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State and the American Indians (St Louis, mo: Concordia, 1966), 86–8; Henry Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Culture Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 142; Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader,” 253. 9 Throughout this chapter, I refer to Puritanism as a theological and liturgical movement within numerous denominations and to Congregationalism as a denomination in which all decisions regarding church polity are made independently in each congregation. 10 Occom, entry of 17 September 1768, Diary, vol. 1, 82. Occom’s diary (journal) is recorded on three rolls of microfilm, Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover,

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New Hampshire. The diary and sermons, both on microfilm, have never been published. For a printed form of Occom’s autobiography used throughout this chapter, see Samson Occom, “A Short Narrative of My Life, 1768,” in Colin Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, 55–61 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994). The singular is used when referring to Indian nations, as it better indicates their unity as a distinct people. Letter of Wheelock to Whitefield, 25 November 1761, Wheelock Papers, #761625. Samson Occom, A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (New Haven, ct: Draper and Boyles, 1773), found in Early American Imprints (Charles Evans Collection), #12907 and #12908. Occom’s intentions regarding the publication of this sermon are not clear. He received a letter from Moses Paul requesting that he preach the sermon and indicating that “many Gentlemen in Town” also expressed that desire; see Blodgett, Samson Occom, 139–40. In his sermon, he says to the condemned, “it was your desire that I should preach to you this last discourse … You are bone of my bone, and the flesh, of my flesh. You are Indian, a despised creature”; see ibid., 17. Whether Occom, remembering his popularity earlier in Britain as a result of his preaching, composed the sermon anticipating its possible publication and distribution in the wider community is a matter of conjecture. In this chapter, I take the position that Occom preached primarily to Moses Paul but that he was fully cognizant of its potentially extended application, as a crowd of bystanders also heard the sermon. Samson Occom, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations, by Samson Occom, Minister of the Gospel (New London, ct: Timothy Green, 1774), found in Early American Imprints (Charles Evans Collection), #133507. Brothertown is located about ten miles south of present-day Utica, New York. A sign for the town still stands beside the highway, but the community has disappeared, except for Occom’s house, which has been maintained as a historical site. William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1868; reprint, New York, Arno Press, 1969), vol. 3, 194. Occom, “Short Narrative,” 55. See Bert Salwen, “A Tentative ‘In Situ’ Solution to the Mohegan-Pequot Problem,” in William Young, ed., The Connecticut Valley Indian, 81–8 (Springfield: Museum of Science, 1969). For the theory that colonial malaise following Connecticut’s involvement in King Philip’s War (1675) dampened enthusiasm for Indian missions, see Albert Vandusen, Puritans against the Wilderness: Connecticut History to 1763 (Chester, ct: Pequot Press, 1975), 67. For legislation against Native people, see Connecticut Colonial Records, 1636–1725 (Hartford: Connecticut State Archives, 1922, 1924), vol. 1, 2, 46, 73, 160, 350, 402; vol. 2, 359, 529, 563.

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20 Alden Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), 346; Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity School at Lebanon in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763), 25. 21 For a background to the Puritan missionary movement, see Francis Jennings, “Goals and Functions of Puritan Missions to the Indians,” Ethnohistory 18 (Summer 1971): 197–212; G. Thomas, “Puritans, Indians and the Concept of Race,” New England Quarterly 1, no. 2 (March 1975): 3–27; William Simmons, “Cultural Bias in New England Puritan Perceptions of Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 38 (January 1981): 56–72 at 56–7. 22 William Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776 (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), 104, 251–5. Attempts in 1755 by the same company were similarly rebuffed by the Mohegan; see ibid., 255. 23 Occom, “Short Narrative,” 56–7. 24 Paul Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 76–7; Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1967), 196–9; Edwin Gausted, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1957; reprint, Gloucester, uk: Peter Smith, 1965), 45–7; Frank Lambert, “‘Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737–1745,” in Stanley Katz et al., eds, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 5th ed., 636–63 (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2001). It is not possible to identify from Occom’s diary the evangelists who came to Mohegan. 25 Authors who provide helpful insight into New England shamanism are Frank Cushing, “Remarks on Shamanism,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 36 (1987): 183–92; John Maddox, The Medicine Man (New York: MacMillan, 1923); Spencer Rogers, The Shaman: His Symbols and Healing Power (Springfield: Charles Thomas, 1982). 26 Occom, “An Account of the Montauk Indians on Long Island, ad 1761,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (1809): 106–11. 27 Details are provided by Gladys Tantaquidgeon, a Mohegan elder and descendant of Occom, as quoted in William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984 (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 1986), 82. 28 Occom, Sermon, 31. Many examples are provided by Frank Speck, “Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: Mohegan-Pequot Diary,” 43rd Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1925–1926 (Washington, dc: Government Printing Office, 1928), 205–24. For traditional spirituality’s recognition of the leadership of a good god, Mandu, and a principal evil being, Djibai, see Simmons, Spirit, 82. 29 David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 7.

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Occom, entry of 17 September 1768, Diary, vol. 1, 82. Letter of Buell to Rev. David Bostwick, 1759, Wheelock Papers, #759900. Occom, Sermon, 30–1. Maddox, Medicine Man, 145. Occom, Choice Collection, verse in hymn 28. His relative Gladys Tantaquidgeon has maintained records of his and other distinctly Mohegan remedies. See Speck, “Native Tribes,” 264–79. These specific medicines assisted the Mohegan nation in regaining its federal status in the United States during the 1990s. For colonial fascination with these features, see the chapter “A World of Wonders,” in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 71–116. A clear analysis of Wheelock’s apprehension regarding Native students and his ponderous approach to Puritan education are well illustrated in Axtell, Invasion, 204–15. A stone pipe, a band to carry heavy loads, a thong to tie captives, a tobacco pouch, a knife case, shoes, and garters are mentioned in Love, Occom, 141. Quoted in ibid., 163. Amplified in Cushing, “Remarks,” 188. See letters between Wheelock and Occom, 1770 and 1771, Wheelock Papers, #770206.2, #771122.1, #771205.1, #771424, and #771465. Letter of Wheelock to Rev. Whittaker, 29 April 1776, Wheelock Papers, #766279; letter of Wheelock to John Thornton, 23 September 1777, ibid., #777523; Richardson, Indian Preacher, 360. Even Occom’s Puritan friend Rev. Buell warned him against “his busy sin pride” in his letter to Rev. David Bostwick, 10 May 1761, Wheelock Papers, #761310. Occom, entry of 13 June 1761, Diary, vol. 1, 57; letter of Occom to Joseph Johnson, 14 April 1775, Wheelock Papers, #775264. For a study of Joseph Johnson’s role in the migration of New England Indians to Iroquoia, see Laura Murray, ed., To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Whitefield’s diary entry of 16 March 1740, in Alan Heimert, The Great Awakening (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 44; Edwards, quoted in Daniel Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: University Press, 1968), 201, 204. See also E. Elliott, Power and Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 10, 114, 175, 203; Kenneth Murdoch, Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1949), 100–1. Occom, “Short Narrative,” 59. For cultural considerations, see Keith Wilbur, The New England Indians (Chester, ct: The Globe-Pequot Press, 1978), 70; Mary Jones, Congregational Commonwealth: Connecticut, 1636–1662 (Middleton, ct: Weslyan University Press, 1968), 32–3; John DeForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, ct: Wm. James Hamersley, 1853), 8.

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46 Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader,” 253–4, supports the interpretation of Occom as leader and broker by indicating that his funeral was attended by Iroquois and Algonquians, led by an American Englishman, and located among the Mohegan. Szasz’s concluding sentence is crucial: “Occom had reshaped Reform Protestantism and brought the message to his own community in a Native environment” (254). 47 Occom, Sermon, 2; Occom, Choice Collection, 3–4. For a discussion of Occom’s printed sermon and collection of songs being “stage-managed” by white publishers, see David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (London: Printer Publishers, 1991), 34–58. 48 Letter of Occom to Wheelock, 27 September 1768, Wheelock Papers, #768527. 49 Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Spiritual,” 74–5. 50 Occom, “Short Narrative,” 61; Occom, Sermon, 28. Weinstein, “Samson Occom,” 98–9, supports the view that Occom focused on his failure to achieve the European financial success expected by Calvinistic theology, in which God grants material prosperity as a reward for righteous living. 51 Szasz, “Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader,” 244–5. 52 From an earlier estimated population of 3000, their numbers dropped to 750 in 1700, and by 1774 there were only 350; see Speck, “Native Tribes,” 212. 53 An interesting account of the effects of internal friction within Uncas’s family on his political future, independent of colonial interference, is given by Richard Metcalfe, “Who Should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and IndianWhite Relations,” Journal of American History 51, no.3 (December 1974): 651–65. 54 For a clear examination of Indian perception of land ownership, and the role of the sachem in this relationship, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 54. 55 “Petition of the Mohegans to King George II, June 1738,” Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society 5 (1986): 159–63. 56 For details of the land controversy, see Edward Beardsley, “The Mohegan Land Controversy,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 3 (1882): 205–55. 57 Family history is given in a letter of Occom to Wheelock, 28 November 1765, Wheelock Papers, #765628; see also Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers (Hartford, ct: Connecticut State Archives, 1922), ser. 1, vol. 1, no. 248. 58 Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, no. 34. 59 Letter of Wheelock to Rev. George Whitefield, 4 May 1765, Wheelock Papers, #765304; letter of 9 April 1766, ibid., #766259; letter of Nathaniel Whittaker to Wheelock, 3 July 1766, ibid., #766403. 60 Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, nos 34 and 284. 61 Minutes of meeting of those involved in the dispute, 12 March 1765, Wheelock Papers, #7675212.

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62 Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, no. 286. 63 Ibid., no. 287. 64 Letter of Occom, quoted in Francis Caulkins, History of Norwich, Connecticut (Hartford, ct: Lockwood and Co., 1866; reprint, Chester, ct: Pequot Press, 1976), 269. Occom’s mention of the English did not refer to those in Britain connected with the Mason case; he was alluding to the Connecticut colonial government. 65 For the discussions between the Mohegan and the Connecticut Assembly, see Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, nos 312, 313, and 314. 66 Described by Occom, entry of 17 September 1768, Diary, vol. 1, 87. In her examination of Indian teachers in Iroquoia, Szasz, Indian Education, makes no mention of any significant contribution by Occom. 67 Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the State, etc. of the Indian Charity School in Lebanon in Connecticut: from Nov. 27, 1762 to Sept. 3, 1765 (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1765), 27–8. 68 Document of 29 August 1781, Wheelock Papers, #781479. 69 Occom’s residency at New Stockbridge resulted from numerous factors: the community’s desire to be more fully involved in his ministry; pressure exerted by New England Indians who knew him and who had settled there rather than at Brothertown; confusion about the future plans of a missionary who had served at New Stockbridge but had left due to conflict with the missionary society over his compensation; and Occom’s concern that New Stockbridge receive adequate spiritual care now that the congregation at Brothertown was established. For a succinct account, see Love, Occom, 278–81. 70 For the economic and religious implications of Puritan itinerancy, see Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 71 Recorded in Love, Occom, 282. 72 Recorded in document of 26 September 1791, Wheelock Papers, #791526. 73 Occom, entry of 6 November 1786, Diary, vol. 2, 276. 74 Occom, “Account of the Montauk,” 108. 75 Ibid., 149. According to Occom, divorce was also easily accomplished. 76 The wedding vows used by Occom, as recorded in Love, Occom, 251, are very similar to those used in Christian churches today. 77 Occom, “Account of the Montauk,” 109–10. 78 Occom, entry of 30 September 1788, Diary, vol. 3, 407. 79 Connecticut Archives, Indian Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, nos 93 and 96. 80 Love, Occom, 285. 81 A list of students’ names is given in ibid., 285; Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity-School, in Lebanon, in Connecticut (n.p., 1771), 18–19. 82 Occom, entry of 7 November 1785, Diary, vol. 2, 198. During my visit with Gladys Tantaquidgeon at her home in the summer of 1990, she informed me that in the Mohegan language, “Brothertown” means “community ruled by love.”

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83 Occom, entry of 8 November 1785, Diary, vol. 2, 198. For a comparison with Connecticut town government, see Bruce Daniels, The Connecticut Town (Middleton, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). 84 The book Acts and Laws is mentioned in Blodgett, Occom, 186n; Love, Occom, 186. 85 Occom, entry of 3 September 1786, Diary, vol. 2, 235. For an examination of the land issues affecting the Oneida, see Barbara Graymont, “New York State Policy after the Revolution,” New York History 57 (1976): 438–74. 86 Laws of the State of New York (New York: S. and J. Loudon, 1789), 56, reprinted in Early American Imprints (Charles Evans Collection), #22013. 87 Laws of the State of New York (New York: Francis Childs and John Swaine, 1791), 10–11, reprinted in Early American Imprints (Charles Evans Collection), #23617. 88 Love, Occom, 291–2. It should be noted that Occom was equally determined to remove African Americans from Brothertown; see the land arrangements in 1774, in Love, Occom, 222. 89 Occom, entries of 10–12 November 1785, Diary, vol. 2, 188; Eleazar Wheelock, A Continuation of the Narrative of the Indian Charity School (Hartford, ct: Ebenezer Watson, 1775), 15–16.

14 Overcoming Nausea The Brothers Hesselius and the Great American Mystery1 kenneth a. lockridge

“Who painted these paintings?” Sorting my papers at the beginning of class, I asked the student to repeat her question, as several of her classmates joined in. “These two chiefs,” she explained, “these Indians.” “Page 96,” added a male voice. Pushing aside my incomprehensible syllabus, I lifted up Colin Calloway’s The World Turned Upside Down, a slim volume of Indian voices commenting on the white conquest of eastern America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On page 96 were Lapowinska and Tishcohan, chiefs of the Delaware, a tribe already betrayed and about to be betrayed again. “Nice paintings,” I offered, and they are. “No,” insisted the students, “none of the other paintings of Indians in this book is like these. Who did them? What made him see?” I looked again. All the Indians in Calloway’s other illustrations looked at us as though into a mirror, haughty, uncertain, and hopeful. The limners who portrayed them had been equally uncertain. Their flat colours, profiled poses, and routine backgrounds were from a genre somewhere between tavern signs and a parody of the Great Masters. By contrast, Lapowinska and Tishcohan looked out from wrinkled faces with the insightful eyes of men who had seen too much. The artist was not a master anatomist but a European painter who rendered his subjects in a space that once existed, a claustrophobic foreground deep enough for sculptural figures to emerge from the surrounding dark. A clear glaze over each painting intensified the faces, colour, and detail. In these works the painter had risen above himself, above technique, above history. He had seen these chiefs for men.

The Brothers Hesselius Figure 14.1 Gustavus Hesselius, Lapowinska and Tishcohan, 1735. Courtesy of the Atwater-Kent Museum, Philadelphia.

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“Who painted these?” my students asked again, “how could he see so well, why was he different?” I read Calloway’s caption. It seemed that a painter named Gustavus Hesselius had painted the two Delaware chiefs for the Penn family, proprietors of Pennsylvania, before the treaty negotiations of 1735. The painter’s name told me that I would be able to seek an answer. “Gustavus Hesselius” had to be Swedish. My wife’s family is Swedish, our son is Swedish, and I speak the language and have done research in Sweden. In the last year and more, I have travelled far to find an answer to my students’ question. I’ve left Montana to follow Gustavus Hesselius from Stockholm to New York. Even now, after months of research, I cannot tell you for certain where Gustavus Hesselius got his clear sight during those days in the spring of 1735. But I can try. Gustavus Hesselius is well known to art historians, and his name appears in encyclopedias. The typical entry reads: b. in Folkarne, Dalarna, Sweden, in 1682, nephew-in-law of bishop and statesman Jesper Svedberg. With his brother Andreas, a priest in the Swedish Lutheran Church, left Sweden in 1711 toward the end of the disastrous reign of Charles XII seeking opportunity in the former Swedish colonies in Delaware. Gustavus and Andreas arrived in Philadelphia in 1712. Their brother Samuel, also a priest, came several years later. Andreas and Samuel soon returned to take up parishes in Sweden, but Gustavus, who had studied painting in Uppsala and Stockholm and was the first professionally trained portrait painter in the colonies, found clients for his skills in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Maryland. He married and began a lineage of wealthy and artistic descendants in America. His son John (1728–78) eventually moved south and painted the great planters of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution. Gustavus Hesselius died in Philadelphia in 1755, at the age of age seventy-three.

This entry alone opens worlds: “Toward the end of the disastrous reign of Charles XII?” By the time Gustavus Hesselius left Sweden in 1711, a fifth of its population had died of battle, disease, and famine in the course of King Charles’s endless war against Norway, Denmark, Poland, Saxony, and Russia. Constant counterattacks against this entire ring of enemies were the only way that he could find to save a Swedish empire built up during the Thirty Years’ War. But he could never subdue them all simultaneously. In that same year, Charles endured a humiliating defeat deep in southern Russia and was interned by the Turks when he fled into their territory. Sweden would somehow hold out without him, but when he returned in 1714 to renew his obsessive campaigns, his officers would assassinate him to end the nation’s suffering. By then,

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Figure 14.2 Gustavus Hesselius, self-portrait, c. 1736. Courtesy of the AtwaterKent Museum, Philadelphia.

Sweden lay open to conquest. Peter the Great dawdled with reforms while moving slowly to pluck the Swedish fruit. Pieces of empire fell away like shuttle debris: Kurland, Estonia, parts of Pomerania. “Bishop and statesman Jesper Svedberg?” The patriarchically bearded bishop whose piety did not prevent him from sweeping together the beginnings of a noble’s estate from the ruins of this crumbling Baltic empire, the man whose son, Emmanuel Swedenborg, would abandon it all to become a mystic? What stories! And Hesselius’s paintings survive, too, dozens of them, in the AtwaterKent Museum in Philadelphia, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in the Maryland Historical Society. Art historians have spent decades

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identifying Hesselius’s paintings, dating them, digging out fleeting references to him in patrons’ letters, and speculating about the painter’s mentality from the ways that he arranged pigment around the selfprojections of the various members of the colonial elite whose commissions he accepted. Save for brief mention, his ancestors, contemporaries, and children, and the historical mansions that they inhabited, might as well not have existed. One good reason for this focus on the canvases themselves was – and here I reveal Hesselius’s greatest secret – there are no papers. Neither the artist nor his limner son left more than a letter or two and a few legal transactions in the Maryland Archives. Remarks on or about the man in other historical documents are almost nonexistent. He is the ultimate circumstantial case, known only from his milieux, from stray inarticulate facts, and through the rare letter left by himself or others. In the 1980s one historian of art, Roland Fleischer, finally assembled in a great exhibition and its catalogue all that was then known of or could be seen by this Swedish painter. Fleischer viewed the paintings in the context of as rich a set of facts about Hesselius as had ever been collected. This feat was impressive, but what I noticed about Fleischer is that he felt a chill go up his spine when he saw the portraits of the Delaware chiefs. He had tried to express in scholarly language the excitement that we all felt. “Of the Hesselius portraits, none is superior to these in expressiveness and sensitivity. Many portraits [by others] with more skillful handling are less sympathetically conceived and less capable of evoking the viewer’s interest. Even if Tishcohan and Lapowinska had unusually expressive faces, Hesselius was equal to the task. The nobility conveyed here on canvas is more basic and deeply rooted than that in the majority of eighteenth-century portraits. It rests on the solid foundation of human character and dignity. His powers of personal response to the subject before him were at their peak.” I read this to my students. Yes, we all thought, we felt it too. Though to us the expressions on those two faces are somewhere beyond nobility. Those men had seen almost too much. They knew that they would see more of the same, and that they would not lose their dignity. Fleischer had also published what was then the only known letter by Gustavus Hesselius. Of interest was not the letter itself but that its appearance in print led Kathryn Carin Arnborg, an obscure graduate student in art history labouring in the ranks of doktorander at the University of Stockholm, to find another and far more significant letter by Hesselius. “I thought it was interesting that America’s first real portraitist was a Swede and that so little was known about him,” she told me when we met last summer in Humlagorden, the idyllic park in the heart of busy Stockholm. “So I rang up the Carolina [Carolina Rediviva, the great

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library of the University of Uppsala, sixty miles up the road from Stockholm], and they said, ‘Oh, yes, our files show that we have one quite long letter by Gustavus Hesselius and several by his brother Andreas.’” The item by Gustavus was a copy of his first letter home to his mother, written in June 1714, two years after he had disembarked in Pennsylvania, and it contained a revelation for those of us who thought that Hesselius had always seen Native Americans with sympathetic eyes: Concerning the Indians it is a savage and terrifying folk. They are naked both menfolk and womenfolk, and have only a little loincloth on. They mark their faces and bodies with many kinds of colors … The womenfolk shave their head on one side, on the other side they let the hair grow, as long as other women. Here and there bald. They grease their bodies and head with bearfat and hang broken tobacco pipes in their ears, some hang rabbit tails and other devilments, and they think they are totally beautiful. Some time they eat man meat when they kill each other. Last year I saw with my own eyes that an Indian killed his own wife in broad daylight in the street here in Philadelphia, and that bothered him nothing. While she was dying the other Indians sat around her; some blew in her mouth, some on her hands and feet. I asked one of them why … and he answered that a fire coal that would die you must blow on so that it will not go out. When she was dead they all began to shout and had so many awful effects that a man could be scared of them.

Twenty years before his luminous portraits of Lapowinska and Tishcohan, this frightened young immigrant had thought of painting Indian chiefs, but in a very different spirit: I have always thought of painting an Indian and sending to Sweden … Last year one of their kings visited me and saw my portraits they astonished him very much. I painted also his face with red color he gave me an otterskin for my trouble and promised I could paint his Portrait to send to Sweden: but I did not see him later. The king is no better than the others, all go naked and live worse than swine.

When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive. Two years after his landing, the shock had still reverberated in his letter home. Nothing at home, not even in the collapsing Sweden of 1711, had prepared Hesselius for half-naked Aboriginals murdering each other in the streets. Perhaps he still recalled the “filthy savages” whom he had seen raging in the streets of Philadelphia when, more than two decades later, in 1735, he portrayed Lapowinska and Tishcohan with warts and all. Possibly he meant by the meticulous details, the wrinkled

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skin, the worn, not spectacular traditional dress and ornaments, that there was still nothing noble about these savages. Their calm gaze and natural stance may have been all that he could concede toward the still nobler images that his patrons, the Penns, expected Hesselius to deploy to help them flatter the chiefs before they were robbed of their remaining tribal lands. On the other hand, Hesselius may have grown in wisdom in the twenty years since he wrote that fright-filled letter. He may have learned to admire the Delaware “savages” who fought so enduringly to preserve their homeland from European and Iroquois rapacity. He might even have become, like his brother Samuel, something of an early anthropologist, seeing in the Indians and their artefacts – in such objects as enigmatic war clubs with mute human faces carved on the killing ball – a lesson in human difference that evoked awe in him. And, at the outer limits of human possibility, he might have learned to live with all the manifold “others,” the Indians, Germans, Scotch-Irish, and slaves, who already inhabited or, like himself, flooded into the middle colonies in the years 1712 to 1735. Was it the wisdom of a wide tolerance that made his eye dispassionate? Whether Hesselius became one of the rare persons living in the American colonies in the eighteenth century who first learned to accept a multiracial society suddenly became a mystery worth exploring. Early Pennsylvania would have tested any man’s tolerance. By the time Hesselius painted the Delaware leaders, Pennsylvania and adjoining sections of New Jersey and Maryland had already become the model of a new kind of society never before seen in the Western world. Indians who refused to be conquered demanded a place at every table, including for a while the Delaware, and in the south the Catawba, and always in the north the Iroquois, once the dreadful power brokers of the continent and now the fast allies of the English in the mutual business of conquest and empire. German immigrants in increasing numbers completed the temporary servitude that often paid for their passages to Pennsylvania. They made farms, became British citizens, and the Lutherans among them entered politics en bloc. Among themselves, however, the Germans fought constantly over religion, and fiercest were the battles of the Lutheran clergy against the Moravians, a sect of aggressive, successful, often female proselytizers rumoured to observe weird sexual customs. In their lexicon, Christ’s wound became a vagina. It was as if the Saviour had become female. On the heels of the Germans came the Scots-Irish, a wild tribal folk nominally Presbyterian who had been moved to Ireland to help subdue the still wilder Irish but had no use for any government and now moved west and south through Pennsylvania in their tens of thousands, taking land as they pleased and killing Indians to get more.

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Their practices dated from the era when the Scots’ ballads had been conceived. Courtship by stealth preceded marriage by abduction. Hillbillies. My people. One Virginia aristocrat called them the “Goths and Vandals” of the age. Among the free English in the east, the prospering Quakers found themselves challenged for leadership by equally wealthy Anglicans and a few enlightened – as they saw it – Scots Presbyterians. These religions in turn would be challenged, after 1740, by evangelical “New Lights” recruited from all ethnic groups, passionate laymen who regarded all the old churches and their educated ministers with burning contempt. On the coast, a few remnant Swedes and Finns joined the mix, mingling with rowdy, lascivious sailors and plausible Irishmen running from the Royal Navy or worse. An underworld of sweat, despair, and deception played itself out on the roads. In eastern Pennsylvania, the rising stream of English, Irish, and German indentured servants working for terms from three to seven years to pay for their passages to America was joined by increasing numbers of African slaves, until 30 per cent of the labour force in Philadelphia and its hinterland was made up of one form or another of captives. White or black, all could be bought and sold. Many tried to escape. Thousands of advertisements in the Philadelphia newspapers invited bounty hunters to seize the runaways trying to flee from bondage. Scores of men who were little better off than their victims stalked these runaways. They made their livings by shutting up anyone suspect seen on the road and holding them without warrant in hope of a reward. When caught, the labourers ran away again. Above the mounting cacophony stretched no established state church – for there was religious freedom here in Pennsylvania – and a proprietary government that was run, save for a rowdy elected assembly, by the Penn family. By this time, the Penns had converted to Anglicanism and had become obsessed with turning their ownership of the land into massive profits. They found their efforts violently opposed by nearly every other group in the society, when these groups were not distracted by their struggles with each other. Sometimes, the several religious and ethnic factions jerked about under the manipulations of Benjamin Franklin, the magician of an apparently mad political system, but at other times Franklin’s clever tongue availed him nothing and he became a chip in the storm. No one ruled in Pennsylvania, least of all the king. If our frightened Gustavus Hesselius got accustomed not just to Indians but also to this kind of society, he was a most unusual Swede. The newly arrived Hesselius would have had to travel far to become a tolerant man. If we are going to make of him a Jason without Argonauts, journeying toward regions of consciousness never before experienced,

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we need to know the mental distance we are asking him to leap. To understand how great that distance was, we have to locate him first in the almost otherworldly context of the Sweden from which he came. Old Sweden was a hermetic social universe. By this, I do not mean the collapsing Sweden of Charles XII but the ordinary everyday Sweden in which Gustavus grew up, a Sweden whose assumptions endured largely intact until the 1980s. It was an extreme model of how many eighteenthcentury Europeans thought about society. Within Sweden itself, there was one folk, one church, and one true realm. By the eighteenth century, the Swedish national self was so completely unified that it stayed behind Charles XII as he led the empire and the nation to ruin by facing more enemies than it could handle in the only posture he knew, attack. Only when the nation was exhausted, a quarter of its population dead, its external territories disappearing, and Russian armies about to invade did a few officers shoot the mad king and save the nation. The nation could not save itself. It did not know how to disagree with itself. It is difficult to grasp the daily control exercised over this unitary society by its tribal state. Under something called the Indelningsverk – the Proportion Works – every village was assigned its share of the soldiers needed to defend the realm and the empire. Local leaders met to provide a cottage (torp) for each soldier’s family while he was away in service, and when he failed to return, they chose a replacement. They equipped their troops as sailors, artillerists, or musketeers as specified by the Crown. There was never much debate about how many soldiers a given village should send because the state church kept nearly perfect track of the population in every hamlet in the land. And in this role, as tracker of the population, the Swedish Lutheran Church was sovereign. Gustavus Hesselius was raised in the parish of Folkarne in Dalarna, in the traditional heart of Sweden. Several times a year, usually in early spring and fall, when good weather made travelling easy, the minister came riding to each hamlet in his parish in a predetermined sequence. Nervous hospitality awaited him at the house of the biggest farmer in the settlement. Dressed in starched collars and black hats, the host and his wife waited before the door. Every soul in the hamlet was gathered inside, standing in rough order of rank and age, old farmers and their spouses, younger farm pairs with their children, modest cottagers, day labourers, and male and female servants working on annual contracts for subsistence wages and small respect. Servant girls brought in warm drink or perhaps small beer together with aromatic bakelser from the kitchen hearth just behind the great room where the company stood gathered. Soon the minister, still called a priest (prest), lifted the heavy house-examination book onto the dark farm table, opened it, and

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Figure 14.3 Mark Fritsch, map of Sweden showing provinces. Produced for author.

Lappland Västerbotten

Ängermanland

Jämtland Härjedalen

Medelpad Hälsingland Västmanland Vättem

Gästrikland

Dalarna

Uppland

Närke Värmland

Stockholm

Dalsland Vänem

Mälaren Södermanland Östergötland

Bohuslän

Gotland

Västergötland Smäland Halland Öland Skäne Blekinge

called the first name. It always fell to the host farmer to be examined first. The minister looked up from his book, pen in hand. The pages of the book were ruled into small rectangles containing on the left a column of the names of the parishioners within this settlement by rank and family, their birth dates, and ages. To the right, across the top of the page, unrolled a series of headings. From each name in the left-hand column extended rightward a corresponding row of blank spaces, such that every person would receive a score from the minister under each of the progressively unrolling headings at the top of the page. The headings spoke in plain language: “reading,” led the first, then “understanding,” then headings for various parts of Luther’s catechism, and farthest right a place for “notes,” which usually meant behaviour. Every soul in the house would be tested by the minister on his or her ability to read and understand the Word of God as offered by

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the church and interpreted by it in the catechism. Notes were added describing anything unusual in the examinee’s condition or attitude. While not explicitly political, the catechism made clear that loyalty to the king as the head of the church, and so to the monarchical state to which the church belonged, was a duty to God. If you wanted to move, or marry, or take communion, you had to meet the standards set by the state and enforced in public by its local minister. The leader of the local farmers stepped forward. The minister asked the first question. As those assembled rose one by one to be examined, it became obvious that there was a terrible democracy in the process. By the end of the day the meanest servant girl, rising last, could visibly outperform the stumbling master of the greatest farm in the parish. Everyone heard and everyone knew. To remove some of the sting, the pastor kept his scores in code, but the meaning of these thin lines with crossing lines and dots above had long since become an open secret in the congregation. The bell-ringer had told his wife. Now they could follow the pastoral hand as he put the dots of highest distinction above the servant girl’s score that he had never entered for the farmer, their host. Social pressure proved an effective spur to learning. By 1711 nearly the whole Swedish population could read fairly well and understand the Word and the world in the way that their state and its church wished. In every house in Sweden hung an embroidered picture of the hierarchies of authority in the nation. At the top of the picture was God and beneath Him the king, who in principle must obey God, and below the king came the descending channels of secular and religious authority down to the individual household. Within the household, the husband ruled over his wife, children, and servants, but his wife had authority over children and servants as well. The hustavla was the Swedish world at a glance. Like all his countrymen, Gustavus Hesselius had this picture in his head when he emigrated. He had never seen anything like Pennsylvania. He was nauseated by more than just the Indians. His first letter home opens with a conventional pastoral praising the beauty and abundance of nature in the new land, but when he depicts the people of Pennsylvania, he makes no attempt to disguise his disgust: “The people here in this city are mostly sinful and ungodly, a mixture of many religions. The teachings of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Papists etc. are a hindrance for our pure religion among our Swedish, who could easily be seduced. Therefore the parsons must daily travel around to them and teach them. God help brother Andreas!” It is not in character for a Swede to use an exclamation point. Faced with all the people of Pennsylvania, Gustavus

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Figure 14.4 Husfoerhoerslaengd/House-Examination Record, nineteenth century, public domain. Courtesy of Svenska Archiv Arbetet i Ramsele, Sweden. From microfilm.

employed several. And while he seems here to be alarmed about religion alone, he is also using the various religions as code words to give us his reactions to Pennsylvania’s peoples and larger society. Every European knew that the Anabaptists had taken over the city of Muenster early in the sixteenth century and transformed an orderly burgher town into a sty of mad prophecy and free love. Catholics and Lutherans had joined forces to take the city, slaughtering the leaders of the movement, together with most of their followers and hundreds of innocent victims. “Anabaptism” became a code word not just for religious heresy – after all, the very Catholics and Lutherans who had united to kill the Anabaptists called each other heretics – but for how

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unregulated religious sentiments always created deadly social anarchy. In Sweden a stable religion carefully regulated by the state was the fabric around which national identity was woven. To lack a state religion was to subsist without group identity on the borderlands of chaos. But Hesselius’s fear of all religions in Pennsylvania save his own appears a little irrational, even by the standards of the day. Only a few dozen Anabaptists lived in Pennsylvania when Hesselius arrived, so they were no immediate threat. The “Papists” and “Presbyterians” whom he adds to his epistolary list of horrors were not remotely as alarming to a European as the anarchists of Meunster. From a Lutheran perspective, the additional presence of Catholics and Presbyterians was not good, but elsewhere in the world each of these churches was a stable state religion. Only a handful of Catholics had settled in Pennsylvania at the time, and they could lose their property whenever Britain decided that they had become too active a force in the colony. There was no danger from the Papists. Why, then, did all of these religions alarm him? What frightened Hesselius was that they were all there, and others on the way, different religions behind which lay different social groups, some from disorderly areas of Europe. He was also troubled that amid such excessive diversity, many persons lived essentially outside any church. “The people here in this city are mostly sinful and ungodly, a mixture of many religions.” “I have married a Calvinist,” he told his mother in the same letter, as if he could not believe he had done such a thing. By then he’d been three years on his own. But he assures Mama that his wife is pious, virtuous, and god-fearing even so, and that “she wishes soon to leave this Sodom for our old Sweden.” Shortly thereafter, he implies that the Indians’ religion is deviltry, moving the location from Sodom to hell. He all but tells her that the smell of the Indians makes him sick. Swedish nausea was not unusual. Consider the Reverend Nicholas Collin, who arrived from Uppsala in 1771 to take up a rural Swedish pastorate and soon clambered his way up to the ministry of Gloria Dei, a Lutheran parish in Philadelphia itself. While he stayed on until his death in 1831, his attachment to America was chiefly conditioned by his ability to mingle with the elite of Philadelphia society, most notably in the ranks of the American Philosophical Society. As time went on, his parish came to be surrounded by newer and poorer districts of the city. Collin reacted with violent distaste when the real diversity and “disorder” of America gathered beneath his window at night to wake him so that he could marry them. He kept a special notebook in which he scribbled remarks furiously annotating the marriage records of his church, lamenting simultaneously the teeming “America” that came

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knocking on his door in Philadelphia and the revolution that had made it worse: Came Margaret Power, who was married to John Martin, on the 22nd of December last, for a new certificate, as he had taken the first from her, and had left her on the very evening of the marriage. She was a widow, 27 years old, and he 26; natives of Ireland. A Negro came with a white woman, who called herself Eleanor King, widow of a sea captain. They were refused. Sunday. At night came a party, and with strong entreaties called me out of bed. On my refusing to marry the couple they went off in a vicious manner, throwing a large stone against the entry door. A French captain of a privateer came with a young lady, from Baltimore. Begged very hard but refused. A Swedish mariner came to engage my service in his intended nuptials: refused until he produced testimony of the woman’s character. Warned him not to forget his national character in this foreign alliance A Negro came with a white woman … I referred him to the Negro minister … having never yet joined black and white. Nevertheless these frequent mixtures will soon force matrimonial sanction. What a parti-colored race will soon make a great portion of the population of Philadelphia.

This wasn’t a population you could invite to a husfoerhoer. The frequency with which national and racial differences are noted distastefully in these cases makes it clear that Collin is not objecting simply to “disorder” – although he definitely complains that bad laws from a weak state mean that there is no way to control a disobedient population – but that ethnic and racial diversity lies at the foundation of that disorder. He confirms this when he comments on his own marriage records: “From this will be seen,” he observed disdainfully, “what multifarious intermixing takes place continuously.” He continued the record obsessively, as though he were taming the disorder by condemning it in secret with his pen or by leaving a record for God to avenge. In 1795 he wrote, “Oh, when shall I be cleared from this detestable place.” He had thirty-six more years to go. He never made it back to Sweden. Nicholas Collin traces a trajectory on which Gustavus Hesselius had started but that, I believe, he never completed.

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Hesselius, Collin, and their Swedish compatriots were not alone in their dismay at Pennsylvania. Nor was such dismay a European monopoly. Immigrants from New England experienced a similar revulsion. One such immigrant who arrived a few years after Hesselius was Benjamin Franklin, who was acquainted with Nicholas Collin and inwardly shared his sentiments. In many respects, New England was another Sweden. Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut were also unitary societies with tribal governments. By the early eighteenth century, the Puritans had lost some of their original control of the colonial government in Massachusetts but still maintained a “New England Way” known for its tribal sense of identity. Only saints had the right to vote in church affairs or in colony elections. The rest of the people were presumably saints-in-waiting. Every tenth man, usually a saint, was a “tithingman,” who supervised the morals of ten families, including his own. Certain of these practices ebbed with time, but far into the eighteenth century, reactionary Puritan tribesmen would dominate the lower house of the colonial government and control the established church. In 1723 young Benjamin Franklin fled Boston, Massachusetts, to take refuge in Pennsylvania. The young man had displeased both Increase and Cotton Mather, the archdeacons of the Puritan world. He ran to Philadelphia in 1723 lest the Mathers put him in jail or make his life miserable. Franklin throve in his new home, but his reactions to it were quite complex. At first, no one thought him a Puritan. He began as a simple tradesman and soon progressed to scientist, politician, and man of the world. The diverse society of Pennsylvania did not seem to bother him. Franklin became a needed mediator between the factions of a divided society quarrelling within a disturbed government, and in this role it was useful to have a reputation for tolerance. But when things did not go his way he could call down vengeance on his enemies like an Old Testament prophet. His enemies were usually people who were different from himself. He hated the Scots-Irish, whom he secretly despised as barbarians, and of all people the Germans, who had had the effrontery to vote against his candidates for the colony’s legislature. When the Germans failed to support him, he used a published essay to lash back at them and at “dark skinned” immigration in general: Why should the Palatine boors [the Germans] be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will soon be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.

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Which leads me to one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawney. And in Europe the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only being excepted, who with the English make up the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers increased. While we are scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making our side of the planet reflect a brighter light to the inhabitants of Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?

Benjamin Franklin could leave Puritanism behind, but Puritanism – in the form of a desire for one people, pure and moral, under a single leadership, his – never left him. Nicholas Collin would have been insulted to be called “swarthy,” but otherwise he and Franklin would have seen eye to eye. Nothing in their early lives had prepared them for Pennsylvania. There were other reactions to the horrors of diversity. Consider Joseph Martin, an orphan boy raised in righteousness on his grandfather’s farm deep in rural Connecticut. In 1776 he left his simple but impoverished life as a farm labourer to join the Revolutionary army. Private Martin marched with the army to camp in Valley Forge in the hard winter of 1777. His officers assigned him and other Connecticut lads to collect food for the army from local German farmers because the polite New Englanders were more effective foragers than were the ominous “one-eyed men” – the eye-gouging Scots-Irish – who had joined the Continental army there in Pennsylvania and from points south. In the spring, when the British army evacuated nearby Philadelphia, troops from Pennsylvania joined Washington’s army to help pursue the British back across New Jersey and into New York. Martin came along, but as the army entered rural New York, he hung back to see some friends farther behind in the marching order. While he was resting by the side of the road, the American army’s “baggage train,” as it was called, creaking along miles behind Washington’s regiments, caught up to him. Last in the line of wagons came Pennsylvania’s “baggage,” a rowdy collection of teamsters, camp followers, wounded, and shirkers from every folk group in the colony. The one-eyed men were there; so was everyone else. Franklin would have named it Hell on Wheels. Martin was transfixed: Our baggage happening to be quite in the rear, while we were waiting we had an opportunity to see the baggage of the army pass. When that of the middle

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states [Pennsylvania, New Jersey] passed us, it was truly amusing to see the number and habiliments of those attending it; of all specimens of human beings, this group capped the whole. A caravan of wild beasts could bear no comparison with it. There was “Tag, Rag, and Bobtail”; some with two eyes, some with one, and some I believe with none at all. They beggared all description; their dialect too was as confused as their bodily appearance was odd and disgusting. There was the Irish and Scotch brogue, murdered English, flat insipid Dutch [German], and some lingoes which would puzzle a philosopher to tell whether they belonged to this world or to some undiscovered country.

More fascinated than repelled, Private Martin had discovered America. I’m not sure that Gustavus Hesselius ever made it so far. Yet the paintings do not lie. There is evidence beyond the enigma of oil on canvas to tell us that Gustavus Hesselius began to cross a threshold that many Americans then and since have been unable to cross. What happened to him in Pennsylvania changed him progressively, but the transformation was latent in his past, a past that distinguished him from his brothers Andreas and Samuel, who did not stay the course but left America to return to Sweden. The secret lies in a closer reading of Gustavus Hesselius’s first letter home and in what is known about his life experiences in Pennsylvania and nearby in Maryland and New Jersey over the next forty years. He had already begun to change before writing the letter. I believe that he knew this and that he wrote the letter in part because he knew that he was changing and needed to assure his mother and perhaps himself that she would not lose him entirely. In the simplest sense, of course, he had waited two years to write her because he needed to know that clients would seek out his services and that he could earn a living. Unlike his brothers, he was a freelance artist with no churchly sinecure to guarantee him income. Only in 1714 was he certain that he could stay a while, although probably he did not know how long. Brother Andreas had surely used his first official report back to the Swedish Church to ask Uncle Svedberg to tell their mother, the bishop’s relative, that both he and Gustavus had arrived safely across the sea. Gustavus could not have written her a detailed message before being certain that he could stay at all. But by the time that he wrote her, he had already broken convention powerfully. The first thing that he had done once income appeared certain was not to write his mother but to marry, and in marrying he had passed over the many attractive young women of the Swedish congregations who for generations provided good wives to imported Swedish clergy – including one of his brothers and later Nicholas Collin – to take the hand of a Calvinist.

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In choosing to marry Lydia Getchie, he sent a double message, one of several signs in the letter that he had a more complex reaction to his new environment than his words of revulsion might indicate. On the one hand, the lady was a Calvinist from a unitary society expressed in a tribal state, Connecticut, so she shared certain assumptions with her husband and probably shared his dismay at what appeared to be Pennsylvania’s chaos. On the other hand, she was a Calvinist, a religion regarded by Lutherans and Anglicans alike as fanatical and disreputable. The only real Calvinist states included the Netherlands, an internally divided and declining power, a few Swiss cantons, contentious Massachusetts, tiny Connecticut, and a Scotland notoriously rent with bloody struggles between shifting combinations of highland Catholics, lowland Calvinists, and the imperial English. By comparison, Lutheran Sweden and Anglican England stood in the top rank of powerful European states. They prided themselves on being stable sovereign powers possessed of substantial empires. Precisely because its empire had begun to fray at the edges, no nation had more confidence in the rightness of its religion than Sweden. To marry a Calvinist was déclassé and a flirtation with heresy if not anarchy. Hesselius had done something bold. For whatever reason, loneliness, lust, ambition for her dowry, a sophisticated wisdom that leaned him toward the new fashion for tolerance, or all of these at once, he had stepped outside his own intolerant framework. This meant that he had some heavy explaining to do to mother. Because Hesselius knew that his mother would be horrified, he broke the news to her in crafted form in his letter. He conceded that she would be shocked, but he did it in a way that clearly put a touch of humour on the news, admitting that Lydia’s father is a “Presbyterian or Calvinist[,] a mean odd fellow,” a cartoon Calvinist. But, he observes lightly, the man might yet be saved because his other daughter has married an Anglican parson, “so we can hope for the best.” There is a nice mix of conventional shock and worldly insouciance in this passage that his mother may read as she likes. Besides, the old man has placed his substantial estate at the couple’s disposal “while I stay here in this country.” He then amplifies this implied promise to return home when he affirms that his bride has converted to Lutheranism and is really an honorary Swede by virtue of her virtuous demeanour and her intentions to move promptly back to Sweden with him. It is at this point that he refers to Pennsylvania as “Sodom,” something he half believed at this stage but that was also useful in diverting Mama’s attention to greater evils than a once-Calvinist bride. Hesselius’s letter shows in many ways a more complicated man than my students or I imagined. He is, for example, overwhelmingly ambitious. His father-in-law’s stone house and fine gardens are lovingly

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portrayed. “Since I came to this country I have earned 600 pound,” he notes (a good living for a minor nobleman in England), and “I lived a year with Master Easton one of the most noble English.” The passages that report his revulsion with the Natives also strain with his desire to paint them. Art and ambition combine to make him say, even as he reports behaviour vile to his sensibility, “I have always thought of painting an Indian and sending [the portrait] to Sweden.” But it is art alone that is at stake when Hesselius notes that one of their kings is astonished by viewing the painter’s oil portraits. To return the king’s implicit compliment to his craft, the painter takes his own red pigment and marks the king’s face in Indian fashion. For an instant, the artist touched the face of the other, painting the face of strangeness in a strange manner, and asking in wonder what this other way of painting meant. But when the king does not return to sit for Hesselius, he and his like become “swine.” Still, just as in the letter we can see that his religion was already bending to embrace one converted Calvinist and her Anglican brother-in-law, so here for a second we can witness Hesselius and an Indian chief gazing at one another, each wondering what magic lay in the art of the other. I do not think this Hesselius is a conventional man. His later life would confirm this impression. As the years passed, word of his professional skills spread throughout the colonial elite. Commissions for portraits mounted, and it became clear that Gustavus and Lydia would not move to Sweden. He produced scores of works, dozens of which survive. Collectively, these paintings tell us that the searching eye of the trained painter could override Hesselius’s ambition as well as his prejudices. He became a portraitist of men, not of women. The absence of paintings of women in his oeuvre puzzled art historians until they turned up a rare piece of documentary evidence that explained the dearth of women. By chance, one of his foremost patrons, James Logan, chief justice of Pennsylvania, wrote to a friend that Hesselius would do his likeness but that his wife had refused to be painted by the Swedish artist. In so many words, Logan described her complaint as, “He paints what he sees.” Hesselius’s renditions of his sitters’ faces, noted the chief justice, struck most of Pennsylvania’s gentlewomen as too “unflattering.” Gustavus’s ruthless eye took him places that he did not otherwise want to go. When he lifted his pigment to daub a tribesman’s cheek, when he studied the signs of age in a woman’s visage, his eye ruled him. Whatever he felt about Indians or however much he wanted a commission, his painter’s eye drew him along, whispering, “Accept. Accept. Paint what you see. Nothing human is foreign to me.” Ambition, a fashionable tolerance, and his eye motivated this man, and this time the eye won. Rather than compromise, he went on painting men.

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By the time Hesselius accepted a commission to paint a large mural in St Barnabas Anglican Church in nearby Maryland in 1720, it had become clear that he could never remain in the Lutheran fold. Jesper Svedberg had ordered the Swedish Lutheran clergy in America to maintain friendly relations with the Church of England, and on the way to Pennsylvania brother Andreas had persuaded the bishop of London to contribute financial support to the Swedish mission there from the Anglican missionary funds for America. The bishop gave gladly, as his church was short of good priests who would go to America, and the Swedes’ preference for moderate religion and strong civil government fitted nicely with Anglican goals in the colonies. But Anglicans were not Swedish Lutherans. They served a wealthier clientele and cultivated a stylish stance as religious citizens of the world who were able to see good in many other faiths. When St Barnabas offered Hesselius a substantial commission to do a mural of the Last Supper, it exposed him to several temptations. Beyond a good fee, the growing fashion for tolerance among men of the world and his well-known social ambition may have helped to persuade him to take this commission, and, as will become apparent, I suspect that his eye was engaged by this new faith as well. Accepting the job would draw him closer to the visual world of Catholicism, yet another of the religions whose multifarious presences had so alarmed him (although not enough to keep him from his Calvinist bride) in 1714. In all events, after he completed the work, he spent as many of his Sundays in Anglican churches as in Lutheran and joined at least one Anglican congregation as member in full communion. From then on, he was as much Anglican as Lutheran. Unlike the still fairly barebones Lutherans, many sophisticated Anglicans had begun to move back toward the Catholic pictorial tradition. While Lutheran priests no longer whitewashed religious paintings out of frenzy for the unvarnished word of God, churches in Sweden had begun to indulge in baroque decorations and occasionally in paintings (indeed, Hesselius had done an altarpiece for a local Lutheran church in 1715, the first religious painting in the colonies). Yet Lutheranism, like most formal Protestantism, remained essentially a religion of print and of the mind. The vivid images of the Protestant tradition still lay in the minds of their despairing believers. The Catholic pictorial tradition, however, was literal, and it stretched back unbroken for centuries. In the Catholic Church no infusions of reforming asceticism had ever broken the passionate attachment of lay believers to vivid physical representations of Christ, Mary, and the saints. Catholic patronage had generated an abundance of great religious art by the masters of the Renaissance whose art Hesselius had studied in reproduction while training in Uppsala. Throughout the Catholic universe,

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an abundance of statues and colourful plaster or canvas surfaces displayed the miracles and mysteries on which popular faith was grounded. Catholic reformers complained that the people thought that the images were the saints depicted. Anglicans had never fully rejected this tradition, and now in the middle of the eighteenth century, high Anglican congregations like that of St Barnabas returned more eagerly to an appreciation of the spiritual value of pictorial representations than some Lutherans were prepared to do. Anglican piety had never been entirely demysticized. The churchwardens commissioned Gustavus Hesselius to paint “ye History of our Blessed Savior and ye Twelve Apostles at ye Last Supper. Ye institution of ye Blessed Sacrament of his body and blood.” When Gustavus Hesselius promised to do a mural at their church, he entered a world of visual piety that his Anglican friends took seriously and that he had never fully experienced. To some of his brothers in Luther, it must have seemed impure superstition. To him, it may have become pure pleasure. The painting is gone, but the clue to his reaction lies in something he did afterward. He became an Anglican, but years later, not long before his death, he painted out of his own need the most passionate of representations in all Christianity, the Crucifixion, which he exhibited in the window of his home in Philadelphia. It must have caused talk. If this is the Crucifixion that John Adams later saw in St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in 1774, it was Catholic indeed. It was, writes Adams, a “picture of our savoir in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds.” Did Hesselius’s eye and heart finally lead him from a Calvinist bride to a Catholic piety made for a man with a pictorial imagination? There was no fashion in this, so he would have had to keep it secret. In 1720 he also sold the land in Maryland that he had named “Swedenland” and the following year became a naturalized British citizen, in Maryland. He could never go home to Sweden, metaphorically or literally. Greater Philadelphia was his home. His children attended the English-language services at their Swedish church, not those in Swedish. Eventually, he made his home in Philadelphia itself. He continued to do well. Part-Lutheran and part-Anglican, possible sentimental Catholic, once the groom of a Calvinist, he had become everything that in his letter home to his mother he had claimed to despise. Gustavus’s brother Samuel met a less successful fate. Samuel arrived in Pennsylvania in May 1719. From the moment that he arrived, Samuel spent as much time preaching in Anglican churches as in Lutheran, eventually acquiring an Anglican congregation of his own. When he left

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Pennsylvania to return to Sweden in 1731, most of the letters of thanks for his efforts were from Anglicans, not Lutherans, and the English priests praised his broad piety and enlightened faith. He was not as popular with some of the Swedes to whom he had been sent to minister because he was wilful and was accused of scandalous behaviour, and also because he was the first Swedish Lutheran missionary in America to try to conduct his Lutheran services entirely in English. He could not rest content as a man of the world himself unless his fellow Swedes in America too joined the world. In this initiative he reversed the whole purpose of Sweden’s great mission to its people stranded along the Delaware littoral, which had been to preserve their national character in the midst of Pennsylvanian chaos. He was an assimilationist. He perceived that the English religion, culture, and language would become the matrix for whatever order emerged in this tangled land. His effort failed, and he was roundly criticized by some of his countrymen. Yet Samuel may have been a catalyst in his brother’s ongoing changes. At the behest of their stay-at-home brother, Johan, who was a doctor and the only Hesselius sibling who could be called a scientist, when he went home Samuel took with him a “chest of curious things” that were to weave their way into his country’s increasing awareness of the wide world. Samuel Hesselius’s chest of curiosities is mentioned in the letters of Killian Stobaeus, the founder of the first historical and ethnographic museum at the university in Lund. From there, Staffan Brunius, a curator at the modern National Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm, has traced the objects through the papers of the aristocratic scientist Carl Gyllenborg, who in 1739 left the chancellor’s post at Lund to become chancellor at Uppsala and a founder of the National Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Evidently, Samuel had sent the chest to Gyllenborg in Lund in 1736 with a request that the objects go to his home university of Uppsala. Some of the objects in the chest may have stayed in Lund – whose museum now hangs on the edge of nonexistence as state support is withdrawn – and the rest evidently followed with Gyllenborg to Stockholm, where some are probably in the collections of the Ethnographic Museum, although a few may have come to rest eventually at Uppsala. Samuel and brother Johan had catalogued the collection in the years immediately after Samuel’s return from America, but their catalogue has disappeared. Samuel’s letter donating the chest mentions many Native American items, including “a stone axe,” “an Indian idol,” and “a belt of wampum,” but because the early objects sent by him and others created a fascination with Indians, the ethnographic collections in Lund, Stockholm, and Uppsala are now so full of similar American Indian artefacts of unspecified origin that we cannot know which were sent by the returning missionary.

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It is impossible to know which Native objects in Lund, Stockholm, and possibly Uppsala were sent by Samuel Hesselius, but it is possible to know in what spirit he sent them to Gyllenborg. In Skolkloster, the seventeenth-century castle on the inland sea called Maelaren, cached among artistic booty seized by the victorious Swedes during the Thirty Years’ War, is a Delaware war club whose like exists in only two other places, Stockholm and Copenhagen. On its killing ball, a mute face has been carved. The face is round-mouthed in unreadable emotion. In the seventeenth century such objects were called “curiosities.” They were collected by aristocrats for display in their castles for the sense of wonder that they evoked, of distance, of strangeness. In 1736 Samuel sent his “curious things” to Carl Gyllenborg in quite another spirit. Gyllenborg represented a new, “scientific” approach born of the Enlightenment and out of which modern ethnography would emerge. While it was still an aristocratic plaything, the systematic study of strange cultures was about to begin. Just as brother Gustavus’s letter home survived in a copy in the collections of Germund Ludvig Cederheilm because that aristocrat wished to appear an aficionado of the natural sciences, so Samuel’s letter donating his chest of curiosities survives because it was saved by another aristocrat reaching for science, in this case anthropology. But in his terminology, “curiosa saker,” Samuel revealed that the old sense of pure wonder was not dead in him. Creature of human wonder as well as of the Enlightenment, he marvelled at the enigmatic objects that he forwarded even as in sending them he made himself a scientist and honorary gentleman. Immediately on Samuel’s arrival in Pennsylvania in 1719, Gustavus began his journey toward Anglicanism and into an ancient and vivid pictorial piety that high Anglicans had never entirely rejected and that liberal Anglicans no longer scorned. And soon thereafter, in 1721, he became a citizen of Britain’s world empire, embracing it as well. I cannot help but see Samuel’s wide, tolerant, assimilationist, and, yes, also personally ambitious stance as a spur to his brother’s own growth in these years. Both were becoming men of the world, at home in several traditions. I believe that Samuel’s sense of wonder infected Gustavus as well, and perhaps always had. In 1735, four years after Samuel returned to Sweden and one year before he sent his Indian objects off to Carl Gyllenborg, Gustavus received a commission from the Anglican Penns to paint two Delaware chiefs, Lapowinska and Tishcohan, before a conference that would end in their betrayal. By this time Gustavus’s ambition and hunger for new experience were beginning to take him far from his origins. His eyes had seen much already. The gazes of his two subjects in the paintings come from the same source of wonder as

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Figure 14.5 War club, [Delaware?], mid-seventeenth century. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm.

the silent open mouths of the figures on the Delaware stone clubs in Skolkloster, in Stockholm, and in Copenhagen, or the lost objects from Samuel’s trunk. Samuel and his brother bore simultaneous witness to what was disappearing. Out of the encounters of cultures, Swedish Lutheran, migrant Calvinist, enlightened Anglican, and Native American, out of social climbing, out of the insistent demands of the eye, out of a fashionable and socially useful cosmopolitanism and assimilationism, and a not entirely modern sense of wonder, came Samuel, who went home with his chest of curiosities, and Gustavus, who remained to paint the two portraits that so moved my students. And what happened to Lapowinska and Tishcohan? After their portraits were completed they attended the meeting to which the Penns had summoned them. There, they were persuaded to agree in principle to a further purchase of their tribe’s lands in the future. Two years

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later, under immense pressure, they accepted the Penns’ offer to buy for a fixed sum as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. On the nineteenth of September 1737, the Penns showed up with three trained runners, the strongest of whom in the next thirty-six hours “walked” off the boundaries of an area nearly a thousand square miles. The Delaware were dispossessed of their homeland. In succeeding years, they became vassals to the Iroquois, who called them “women” to their faces at treaty negotiations. The Iroquois sold the tribe’s remaining lands to the Penns and to other land speculators, taking the small profit for themselves.

coda When they saw the portraits of Tishcohan and Lapowinska the students had asked, “What made the painter see?” The discovery that Gustavus Hesselius may have had to overcome nausea before he could see his fellow Pennsylvanians posed their question even more starkly. Where did the author of the harsh sentiments in his first letter home – even if those mean-spirited thoughts were only meant to reassure his mother that he was still orthodox – find the moral courage to look into those strange eyes? The students never imagined on what a journey they had sent me. At journey’s end, the answer I have given is that, while Hesselius and his brothers had already acquired some sophistication in Uppsala, the longer he lived in Pennsylvania the more tolerant he became. Or put another way, because he and his brothers had arrived with worldly, modern, and genteel aspirations, life in that colony seems to have made them all in one sense or another truly men of the world, particularly the painter, who lived there the longest. Yet these answers no longer satisfy me. To believe that the painter was simply an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan gentleman, properly pious, civilly sophisticated, and ever more sympathetically curious about the other peoples around him does not sit well with the students’ sense of the transcendent power of Gustavus-the-Painter’s portraits of the Delaware chiefs. Whence came his passion to see? I may have found the sources of this passion. Thanks to all the further sources that have crossed my desk since I began writing, Gustavus Hesselius now seems to me a much more deeply moved, even spiritual traveller. He was only disguised as a gentleman. To begin, I now understand better the terrible story of Gustavus’s brother Andreas, with whom he had crossed the Atlantic to Pennsylvania and met his first Indian. Andreas was thirty and a rising star on the faculty in Uppsala when he attracted the envy of Bishop Svedberg. I

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believe that this famously wilful bishop deliberately sent Andreas to exile in America for a decade to keep him far from all opportunities to shine. Svedberg would have told himself that he did it to punish Andreas for pride, but Andreas’s brothers did not see pride in him, nor do I. Peter, the next eldest and himself a priest, spoke for them all when he publicly lamented Andreas’s banishment to limbo. Peter found nothing good in it. As both Svedberg and his brothers had anticipated, Pennsylvania turned out to be a hell for Andreas, who was shocked by the condition of the “Swedish” populations that he found there. When Gustavus had exclaimed to their mother “God help Andreas!” it was because he knew that the spirited and widely learned Andreas was already suffering as he tried to bring orthodoxy, let alone sophistication, to colonial Swedes and Finns used to making their own decisions and tempted by the wide choice of heresies plaguing the land. Svedberg came down hard on Andreas when some of his first reports home honestly describing the sad state of the Swedes in America did not fit the rosy views of the official line. The bishop had the power to leave his victim there forever, and he would later blight the careers of two of Andreas’s younger brothers. In the long run, Andreas bore his duties so well that even Svedberg grew silent. He married a local Swedish woman the very day that Gustavus wed Lydia, pairing with Gustavus’s letter a message of his own informing their mother. The parishioners of his congregation gave him warm recommendations when he was allowed to go home after serving his ten years. He later admitted that only good books and his interest in botany had enabled him to endure his time in America. Andreas’s notes from his time in Pennsylvania also show a remarkable human fascination with the Indians. The liberal language of the Enlightenment occasionally escaped his pen, but he is simply a trusting father as he watches an Indian woman cure his sick little son, and speaks only as a reflective fellow thinker when he describes the religion of the local tribes. He could not bear to fulfil his duties to convert the Indians because he felt so sharply the destruction that Christianity would work in Indian converts by cutting them off from all their traditions and companions. Israel Acrelius, who was later sent out to report on the state of the missions to America, would ridicule Andreas for his failure to bring over “the heathen,” but Andreas could not inflict cultural disorientation on a people whose views he respected. Most of all, he looked Indians in the eyes. At an early conference attended by Iroquois chiefs, he noticed how the eyes of one chief and his wife revealed an openness and kindness that dispensed with the standard mask of Native pride. Gustavus came frequently to his brother’s church and could not have missed hearing Andreas’s views on the Native population.

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Kenneth A. Lockridge Figure 14.6 Anonymous portrait of Bishop Jesper Svedberg, 1714, Gripsholm Castle. Courtesy of the Portrait Collection of the National Museum, Stockholm.

Andreas had a miserable life after he was permitted to return to Sweden in 1723. His wife died in England after a violent storm at sea on the way home, and much of his collection of Americana was lost in the same storm. Svedberg’s anger at Andreas revived when the latter published an innocent memoir of his time in America without the expected obsequious thanks to the mighty bishop. The bishop then sent the widowed man to Gagnef, a substantial parish located near his home in Dalarna, but a parish in which the congregation was run by a clique of headstrong elders and a schoolmaster who tortured Andreas for years. Gagnef was worse than Pennsylvania and far, far from Uppsala. Bishop Svedberg controlled access to positions elsewhere, and somehow Andreas never made it out of Gagnef.

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In 1729 Andreas tried to fight back, not to save himself but to rescue his younger brother Samuel from the bishop’s wrath. In that year Samuel, still in Pennsylvania, came under attack by a headstrong faction in the parish that Andreas had turned over to him before returning to Sweden. When this faction’s complaints came to Svedberg, the bishop condemned Samuel’s behaviour in a letter to the king without forwarding Samuel’s defences of his conduct. In protest over this outrageous procedure, Andreas – who had experienced his own troubles with the arrogant lay patriarchs of that congregation – bypassed the aging Svedberg and asked the king directly to rescue his younger brother from the bishop and to provide Samuel with a good position on his return to Sweden. He forwarded Samuel’s defence of his behaviour, the record of his complete acquittal in a special Pennsylvania court, and letters of support from many of the members of his Lutheran congregation. He also included favourable letters from the local Anglicans, for whom Samuel also preached in keeping with an agreement between the two national churches. It did not work. Samuel never got a decent job as a Lutheran priest in Sweden. After the affair Andreas served the rest of his brief life in Gagnef and in 1733 died a lingering, painful death, possibly of heart failure, never having made it back to the centre of things. News of Andreas’s final suffering and death would have reached Gustavus shortly before he painted Tishcohan and Lapowinska, looking into their eyes, seeing in them suffering, endurance, and dignity. Another emerging story is still more dramatic. Gustavus Hesselius’s known contacts with the Moravians increased steadily from 1743 on. We do not know for certain what turned him in the sect’s direction. He built an organ for them sometime in that year and obviously enjoyed their love of music. Some witnesses thought that the Moravians had been mistreated in a trial held near his home in Philadelphia at nearly the same time, and this may have increased his sympathies for them. Shortly thereafter, the mercurial Gabriel Naesman became minister in Gloria Dei, Hesselius’s Swedish Lutheran parish, and Naesman’s frantic crusades against the Moravians repelled many parishioners. Perhaps when after 1745 he drifted out of Gloria Dei and over to the Moravians, Hesselius was motivated only by a sympathy for the underdog and a desire to observe his own quieter sense of Christianity. Sometime in the mid-1740s, however, Hesselius is reported to have gone to a Moravian leader for advice on the guilt that he felt over having beaten his female house slave. He was already close to the sect, and it was highly appropriate that he would turn to them on such an occasion. While Moravians did not yet forbid slavery, they were on missions throughout the world to convert slaves, Africans, Eskimos, and all peoples

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to their celebratory beliefs. To them Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was offered for all peoples. The Moravian Kingdom of God would not be complete until all were brought into the celebrations of the great gifts of his blood and of God’s forgiveness. They were stunningly successful as missionaries to non-Europeans because their messages of joy and universal human sharing in Christ’s sacrifice were sincere. If Gustavus Hesselius finally committed himself fully to this unique sect because he was deeply ashamed of beating his slave and because the Moravians appealed to a growing desire for racial justice, then the paintings of Lapowinska and Tishcohan, completed a decade earlier, may have been the first recognizable steps in a growing passion for ethnic justice that would in time send him into the arms of the Moravians. Certainly, it took tremendous courage for him to join himself publicly to the Moravians sometime between 1745 and 1748. By 1745 they were the subjects of alarm throughout Pennsylvania. They had eaten out Pennsylvania Lutheranism from within by supplying their own trained Lutheran ministers to the churches, ministers who converted most Lutherans to their increasingly unorthodox Moravian positions. It was public knowledge that the Moravians believed the deity to be female as well as male, worshipped images of Christ’s wound as a vaginalike opening in which they painted little believers living happily, and celebrated in detailed poetry and on actual occasions the union of male and female organs in marital intercourse. If Naesman was right, wild-eyed female proselytizers disrupted Lutheran services with demands that female symbols be placed upon the altars. Lutherans and Calvinists throughout Pennsylvania reacted in horror. By the later 1740s Gustavus Hesselius had joined the Moravians at the very height of their infamy and despite their increasingly controversial reputation. He had done the least fashionable thing that a genteel Lutheran/Anglican could do. Moravian records indicate that he then stood side-by-side with them as they fought the long and sometimes bloody battle for religious preminence with Swedish and German Lutherans that lasted from 1744 to the early 1750s. Something powerful must have motivated him to take such an extreme action. Hesselius’s conversion in these years puts the painting of the crucifixion that he hung in the window of his townhouse in Philadelphia in 1748 in a new light, for the painting now appears not as part of a drift toward Anglo-Catholicism but as a bold public declaration of his adherence to the Moravians and to their vivid revival of the medieval Catholic piety centred on the wounds and blood of Christ. He took this very public step just as the Moravians were most under fire and in need of support. In a letter to the Moravian leader, Count Von Zinzendorf, the Moravian bishop Cammerhoff recounts how “Brother

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Figure 14.7 Moravian painter John Valentine Haight, First Fruits, painting of Christ’s harvest of souls, Pennsylvania, 1755. Permission and reproduction courtesy of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Hesselius’” Crucifixion, then on display in Philadelphia, a work Cammerhoff describes as an explicitly Moravian Crucifixion, helped to make two passing slaves aware of Christ’s suffering and so open them to the Moravian piety. Late in his life, then, Gustavus threw respectability to the winds and freely entered the portals of a radically unfashionable and persecuted religion centred on turning holy suffering into holy joy and actively opening its arms to all peoples alike. At the crucial moment when the Moravians most needed help, he placed a Moravian Crucifixion in the window of his house in the city that was to have been the scene of his respectability. It does not matter whether he was motivated by a general sympathy for the underdog or by a specific quest for racial justice, for in either case his bold action throws light on the paintings of the Delaware chiefs that he completed ten years earlier. His paintings of Lapowinska and Tishcohan now appear to have been only the first of his depictions of suffering. I have always suspected that he was a spiritual adventurer and a man of empathy and passionate conscience. His daughter and her husband,

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a Lutheran priest, barely pulled him back into the fold of respectability before he died. Israel Acrelius, who had been sent out from Uppsala specifically to defeat the Moravians, tried repeatedly to deny that Hesselius’s fling with the Moravians was anything serious, but there was a desperation between the lines of his denials that confirms the Moravians’ claims that the Lutheran establishment was deeply threatened by the conversion of the famous painter. We have to ask why. Did Acrelius merely think that the delay in reclaiming the aged Hesselius for the church had shown weakness in his conduct of the battle with the sectarians, or was he frightened of the larger “disorder” that the Moravians symbolized, not just sexual disorder but racial as well? Had Hesselius gone over to a world where race mattered less and European superiority was not taken for granted? Did Acrelius protest to make light of something that he could never understand? As for the Delaware, already by the time of Hesselius’s death, some of them were becoming Moravians too. Their children would live as Moravians at a village named Gnadenhutten.

sources After completing this work, I discovered that Gunloeg Fur had raised the very same set of questions about Andreas and Gustavus and the two paintings in her “Konsten att se,” in Historiska Etyder, 83–94 (Uppsala: Department of History, Uppsala University, 1997). Fur’s brilliant opening pages expressing her awareness that what we must investigate is the conditions for clear and tolerant sight of others, a capacity found in a few Europeans, make hers the pioneering work in the field. Without the full use of the archival sources in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania or the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, she may perhaps regard Andreas slightly differently than I do. She senses but then drops the importance of Gustavus’s ties to his brother and to the Moravians, and explains the tolerant vision of both by a “marginality” that may not describe Andreas or Gustavus quite as precisely (although both were marginal in several ways, to be sure) as I want us to be able to do. Nonetheless, I have tread inadvertently in the footsteps of a great pioneer and hope that I have been able to refine our depictions of these figures so that we can now return to her key issue of marginality with more knowledge. This chapter is dedicated to her in thanks for her inspiration and generous help once I discovered her work; to Hans Ling of Sweden’s National Commission on Antiquities, who has argued with me tooth and nail about Bishop Svedberg and all manner of things, always with sound information and in friendship; and to Jill Lepore, storyteller extraordinaire, who instantly transformed my meanderings into a tale.

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As far as I know, the only fiction in the chapter has been pointed out by one of the students from the class, who remembers that only one of the paintings was in Calloway’s book and that another member of the group had found and brought a copy of the other to class. I checked the book and, sure enough, there was Lapowinska alone. Otherwise, I have not relied on memory. While I here make interpretive choices on larger historical issues, the only unconfirmed evidence specifically on Hesselius and his brothers is (1) that the crucifixion that John Adams saw in a Catholic church in Philadelphia in 1776 is the one that Hesselius placed in his window in 1748, and (2) that in the 1740s he went to a Moravian leader to discuss his guilt over beating his female slave. In both cases, respectable older authorities either cited sources inadequately or named sources since lost. I have tried to write the text to reflect the uncertainty of these two claims. Otherwise, I have looked up every fact in original sources or in reliable secondary works that footnote specific original sources and are often confirmed by others’ citations. If I have not used footnotes, it is not only because this is a work in progress, but also because there is neither certainty nor science to the origins of tolerance pursued through myriad oblique sources. It delights me to write an informed reflection on an issue that I hope can never be resolved and to name the sources only at the end so as to invite others to make the same journey. If we were to find Gustavus Hesselius’s personal papers and they were to reveal a single specific source of his tolerance, I would be disappointed. We begin with Colin Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), which contains prints of Hesselius’s paintings and which my students saw. For Gustavus himself and his painting, the older and still useful work is Christian Brinton, Gustavus Hesselius, 1682–1755 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1938), and the modern classic is Roland Fleischer, Gustavus Hesselius: Face Painter to the Middle Colonies (Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1987). Fleischer also has an article, “Gustavus Hesselius and the Penn Family Portraits,” American Art Journal 19, no. 3 (1987): 4–18, a piece that led Carin Arnborg to find and publish Hesselius’s long letter home, used here, as “‘with God’s blessings on both land and sea’: Gustavus Hesselius Describes the New World to the Old …,” American Art Journal 21, no. 3 (1989): 4–17. Arnborg’s master’s thesis in art history, “Gustavus Hesselius in Sweden and Europe from 1682 to 1712” (University of Stockholm, 1989), is in English and very valuable. All of these works list most of the vital documentary sources. Carin Arnborg had the assistance of Swedish antiquarian Lars Oestlund with her work, and she has kindly provided me with copies of his excellent and almost perfectly footnoted private (Xeroxed, bound) work on Andreas

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Hesselius, “Andreas Hesselius, Dalapraest och naturskildrare I 1700– talets Delaware” (1993), a work deeply based in a fine reading of original published Swedish sources. It should be published. Oestlund’s earlier Hesselius, Den Bortgloemda Slaeken (Avesta: self-published, 1989) covers the family as a whole, has a specific and valuable essay on Gustavus, and is based in many original sources, but it is not footnoted and the bibliography includes a few genealogical and antiquarian works that tend to mythologize the Swedes in Delaware, so despite Oestlund’s high standards, specific information from this latter work should perhaps be checked. Please note that Hesselius’s paintings of the two chiefs have just been moved from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to the Atwater-Kent Museum of Philadelphia, where they are on display. They are well reproduced in William Sawitzky, Catalogue Descriptive and Critical of the Paintings and Miniatures in The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1942), and are discussed in John C. Ewers, “An Anthropologist Looks at Early Pictures of North American Indians,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 33 (1949): 223–35. James Logan’s remarks about Hesselius’s frankness as a painter are in Frederick B. Tolles, “A Contemporary Comment on Gustavus Hesselius,” Art Quarterly (Autumn 1954): 271– 3. A Google search will turn up standard Swedish biographical dictionaries that report on Gustavus Hesselius, as they do on many of the characters described here. Hesselius’s will is reproduced in Francis de Sales Dundas, Dundas-Hesselius (Annapolis, md: n.p., 1938), 111–14, and other legal documents, including his naturalization, are available online through the Maryland Archives. And a search of the digitalized Pennsylvania Gazette will produce a few more legal notices as well as advertisements for Hesselius’s many skills. Still more information on the three brothers in America and on the Swedes in the middle colonies, including an excellent set of references to sources in Sweden and here, are in Carol Hoffacker et al., eds, New Sweden in America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), especially the essays by Staffan Brunius, Hans Norman, and Richard Waldron. Here will be found references to some of the classic narratives by Swedish priests and others describing the colony, many of which are available in English, most notably Israel Acrelius, A History of New Sweden (originally published in Sweden in 1759), but the William R. Reynolds translation from 1874 – vol. 11 in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania – is available from University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. Andreas Hesselius’s “diary” of notes on America, immensely revealing of the man, is in English as The Journal of Andreas Hesselius, vol. 2 of Delaware History (Wilmington, de: Historical Society of Delaware, 1947), and in Swedish as Andreas Hesselii Anmaerkningar om Amerika, ed. Nils Jacobsson, vol. 21 (Uppsala:

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Saertryck ur Svenska Linneasaellskapets arskrift, 1938). Sadly, Andreas’s bold proposals for reforming the American missions, which aimed straight at Jesper Svedberg’s heart, exist only in the original Old Swedish and are printed in fraktur (old Germanic script) in the original edition of Kort baerettelse om den Svenska kyrkios naervarande tilstoand i America (Norrkoeping: n.p., 1725). Be aware that some of the English translations omit a few pages of the originals. For a sharp contrast to Andreas, and a look at the kind of obedient missionary priest Svedberg preferred, see Andreas Sandels Dagbok, 1701–1743, ed. Frank Blomfelt (Stockholm: Erene, 1988). Then there is the classic work of visiting naturalist Per/Peter Kalm, who spent a day with Gustavus at John Bartram’s farm near Philadelphia, Travels in North America, ed. and trans. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols (1937; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966). Together these sources contain a surprising wealth of contemporary information by and about the brothers Hesselius. The unpublished records of the local Swedish community are widely scattered, and there are no known collections of Hesselius’s family or personal papers. Susan Klepp has kindly provided information on the family from the Gloria Dei church records. The best single source of unpublished documents on the Swedes in the greater Philadelphia area is the Amandus Johnson Papers in the Balch Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hsp). Johnson transcribed many revealing documents in Swedish pertaining to the local Swedish community and translated a few. Lars Oestlund used these sources for his work on the Hesselius family, and I have benefited from his detailed narrative based partly in them, but I still need to see the full Johnson Papers for myself. They were unavailable for some time because the Balch Collection was being moved into the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but recently the hsp has at last been able to send me its description of the folders with copies of the contents of the most crucial folders. Johnson’s selections focus on the ministers and churches and so do not at any point dwell on the more secular Gustavus Hesselius, but these slim folders on Andreas and on Samuel Hesselius with miscellaneous documents in Swedish do have previously unnoticed information on Andreas, which confirms the picture of Andreas offered here. The other Johnson papers are not as promising, but an impending visit will check them all in case any yet-undiscovered bits relevant to Gustavus still hide behind less likely folder descriptions. As for archival resources in Sweden, while I have spent considerable time in Swedish archives over the past thirty years, a recent summer visit to see archivist friends to search their databases for Hesselius and to speak with Kathryn Carin Arnborg, and a subsequent exchange of correspondence with Staffan Brunius, have not been promising. There are some places to look that have not been

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searched thoroughly, but seeking Hesselius papers in Sweden beyond those found by Lars Oestlund would take a year of full-time enquiry with no sure rewards. Hopefully, dissemination of this chapter in Sweden will jog loose some finds. Hans Ling, formerly with Riksantikvarieaembetet, is about to publish further information on the Hesselius family in the online bulletin of the Swedish Colonial Society and has been of immeasurable help in improving this chapter. Staying on the Swedish end of things, Jesper Svedberg’s America Illuminata (1732), the bishop’s abbreviation of his long, somewhat differently titled manuscript Svecium Nova seu America illuminata (see below), which virtually no one seems to have read, is available as America Illuminata, ed. Robert Murray (Stockholm: Proprius, 1985). And selections from Svedberg’s Levernebeskrivning, original 1729, are edited and modernized by Inge Jonsson (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1960). These have just come in, and Jonsson’s excellent introduction does not make Svedberg at all an attractive character. The correspondence between Andreas and the angry Svedberg is cited in Oestlund’s Andreas Hesselius, but much of it appears originally in Svedberg’s long 1727 manuscript, Svecium Nova seu America illuminata, original in the Library of Uppsala University (copy in the Amandus Johnson Papers), on which his 1732 America Illuminata is based, and the correspondence in full is in the Cederhjelmska samlingen, Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek, B238. Samuel Hesselius’s collection of curious things and the early ethnographic world of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden are beautifully described in Staffan Brunius’s contributions to Med vaerlden I kappsaecken: samlingarnas vaeg till Etnografiska museet (Stockholm: Etnografiska museet, 2002), a spectacular book available from the national Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. Brunius has promised to keep me informed of his further progress with Samuel the collector. For the botanical and zoological side of the same culture, see Yngve Loevegren’s first-rate Naturaliekabinett I Sverige Under 1700–Talet (Lund: Skanska centraltrykeriet, 1952). The Swedish husfoerhoer and the literacy campaign that made it work are the subjects of Egil Johannson’s life work and can be sampled in English as Alphabeta Varia, Orality, Reading and Writing in the History of Literacy, ed. Daniel Lindmark, Album Religionen Umense, vol. 1 (Umea: Umea universitet, 1988). See also Franklin Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History, revised enlarged edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988). The famous “Walking Purchase,” by which the Penns cheated the Delaware of their lands, gets fresh treatment from Andrew Newman, “Re-reading the Pennsylvania Walking Purchase,” unpublished seminar paper, available from the Institute for Early American History and Culture. Private Martin is found in James K. Martin, ed., Ordinary

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Courage: The Revolutionary War Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin (St James, ny: Brandywine Press, 1993); in Nicholas Collin, The Journal of Nicholas Collin, 1746–1831 (Philadelphia: New Jersey Society of Pennsylvania, 1936); and in Susan Klepp and Billy Smith, eds, Life in Early Philadelphia (University Park, pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). The Moravians are best seen through the remarkable new article by Aaron Fogleman, “Jesus Is Female: The Moravian Challenge to the German Communities of North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 60, no. 2 (April 2003): 295–332. Fogleman and Paul Peukel of the Moravian archives in Herrnhut and Bethlehem have traced the materials on Hesselius for me through the letterbook of Bishop Cammerhoff and the diary of Moravian missionary Abraham Reinke. The rest of this story will appear in Fogleman’s book on the Moravian challenge, to be published in 2006. The painter’s son John Hesselius, still less well documented than his father, although a portrait painter in pre-Revolutionary Virginia, can be encountered in Richard K. Doud, “John Hesselius, Maryland Limner,” Winterthur Portfolio 5 (1969): 129–53. The gentrified and artistic world that Hesselius’s daughters and descendants married into can be traced under the family name and under “Wertmuller.” The main effort to treat the origins of toleration in religiously diverse Pennsylvania is Stephen Longnecker, Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700–1850 (Metuchen, nj: Scarecrow Press, 1994), but in this thoughtful work the evidence for conflict and mistrust is almost as convincing as the evidence for mutual toleration until well past 1800.

sources for the coda So much further research has gone into the possibilities opened in the final section of the chapter, on the Coda, that an account on sources twice as long as the one above would scarcely do. So let me simplify. The record of Andreas Hesselius’s revolt against Bishop Svedberg, intended to save his brother from the formidable wrath of the bishop, is in the Amandus Johnson Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania – whose staff have been most helpful and skilful – and is copied from records in Sweden. The Moravian sources on Hesselius’s conversion are sometimes mentioned only in the older works cited above – most notably in Charles Henry Hart, “Earliest Painter in America,” Harper’s Magazine 94 (1898): 566–70 – and, as in this case, usually without specific citation. Ronald Fleischer’s notes to his Gustavus Hesselius (see above) indicate that he confirmed nearly all of Hart’s quotations during a visit to the Moravian Archive in the 1980s. The basic

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claim that as late as 1750 the Lutherans were still trying to pull Hesselius back into their fold can be found in the manuscript “Diary of the Moravian Church in Philadelphia,” 2 August 1750 and 31 May 1751, in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, pa, and cited in Fleischer’s Gustavus Hesselius, 25, 30. Much other information and further very specific references come from Professor Aaron Fogleman, who is preparing a book on the Lutheran-Moravian struggles for publication in 2006. The Moravian sources found in these places will have to be located and confirmed with the very helpful new director of the Moravian Archive in Bethlehem, Paul Peucker, who has been kind enough to provide me with the reference from Cammerhoff’s letter to Zinzendorf and with the key pages from Abraham Reinke’s diary, in which he speaks specifically of the support and refuge that Hesselius offered this Moravian missionary when in 1745 he was fleeing persecution. A long visit to the Moravian Archive is scheduled soon. The Swedish side of the Hesselius conversion can eventually be pursued in the eight volumes of records and letters of the Swedish Church in America, nearly completed by the Gloria Dei Records Project, directed by Kim-Eric Williams. Thanks to the cooperation of Professsor Stellan Dahlgren and the Department of History at the University of Uppsala, these volumes will include the letters from Swedish priests to the Consistory in Uppsala. At my request, Gunloeg Fur very kindly looked at her prepublication transcripts of some of the Swedish sources in the Records Project and promptly discovered Israel Acrelius’s emphatic assertions that Hesselius’s Moravianism was of virtually no duration or significance. In context, these words betray an acute sensitivity to the issue that fits with the Moravians’ reports of much agitation over Hesselius’s conversion among Swedish priests in America at the time. Stellan Dahlgren has generously offered to let me see the full transcripts of the rest of the specifically Swedish sources in the Gloria Dei Records Project, and I have researched these. I imagine that the full record of Swedish and American sources in the project when published will have more hints of the affair, but Kim-Eric Williams and Roger Craig, the leaders of the project, are less sanguine and tend to take Acrelius at face value when he says that there is no real story in the Hesselius conversion. This contradicts the Moravian sources, but I know these can exaggerate, so Drs Craig and Williams could be right. Unfortunately, they have been very busy with their introduction and, although the sources are digitalized, have not yet been able to let me search them on any date that I have proposed. Records copied and in the archive of the Frick Library in New York, whose staff and directors have been extraordinarily helpful, indicate that as late as 1811 Daniel Unander, Hesselius’s son-in-law and the Swedish priest most involved

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in his reconversion to Lutheranism, still held the mortgage on the deceased painter’s house. Plainly, Hesselius’s late-emerging spiritual concerns, which might reflect back to illuminate his paintings of Tishcohan and Lapowinska, are very much an open issue between the Moravian sources, on the one hand, and the Lutheran sources, on the other hand, that may show up in the Gloria Dei records presently in Dr Craig’s hands. In the text, I have gone with the present weight of the evidence read deeply in context and with the historian’s feel for what the preponderance of the evidence in context seems to mean, but even for me it is still a work in progress.

note 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in www.common-place.org, vol. 4, no. 2. Reprinted with permission.

15 Patriarchal Authority in Revolutionary Virginia Connecting Familial Relations and Revolutionary Crises1 nancy l. rhoden

The Virginian clergyman and gentleman Jonathan Boucher stated, allegedly in a 1773 colonial sermon, that “[p]arents complain, and not without reason, that children are no longer so respectful and dutiful as they ought to be, and as they used to be; whilst children might, with no less reason, object to their parents’ still more culpable instances of a failure of duty.”2 This commentary is striking for its timeless quality. It might be uttered in almost any era as a superficial judgment about filial insolence and parental responsibilities. Still, it likely carried considerable poignancy for Boucher, a loyalist exile after 1774 who witnessed first-hand the effects of revolution. He had lost his position and considerable property in America, and by the time that he published this sermon in the 1790s, his conservatism had been intensified because of his negative reactions to the French Revolution.3 Since Boucher was one of the American Revolution’s most articulate spokesmen for passive obedience and, therefore, a strenuous advocate of the benefits of law and order and of humans’ obligations to obey government, it is not surprising that he urged children to be “respectful and dutiful” to their parents. This was not only one of God’s commandments, but also a theme frequently repeated in Anglican sermons and educational tracts, including The Whole Duty of Man, and the Anglican cosmology of the “great chain of being” affirmed that social distinctions fostered community health and that obedience to superiors, including parents, was a civic duty. Boucher’s intellectual vision also relied heavily on Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, which emphasized that in the subjection of

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children to parents lies the foundation of all royal authority and thus allowed no right of resistance.4 As a well-read gentleman, Boucher would have been equally well acquainted with Filmer’s critics and challengers, including John Locke, who asserted that fathers had obligations to protect their children and, contrary to Filmer, that political and paternal powers rested on different foundations.5 Although historians have traditionally portrayed Boucher as closely paraphrasing (if not parroting) Filmer, the quotation above may suggest something different: that Boucher clearly recognized and accepted, in a Lockean and Whig tradition, that parental authority was limited and involved mutual obligations.6 Furthermore, we might wonder about the extent to which Boucher and his American contemporaries saw parental and political authority as intertwined? In stating that children “used to be” more obedient, was Boucher trying to suggest that the events of the Revolutionary era were to blame? Had political events altered the operation of authority within the family or perceptions of it? Given that for decades the paradigm of “separate spheres” – one public and one domestic – has characterized scholarship concerning the American family and gender relations of the post-Revolutionary era, an investigation of how intertwined or how separated domestic and public worlds were in the Revolutionary era seems to have heightened importance. Naturally, these questions are easier to pose than to answer. One would expect patriarchal authority7 to be stronger among the elite than among less affluent or impoverished families, so if a shift in such authority occurred, it should be visible there. Fathers without financial resources found that their influence was already considerably diminished by their having little property to bestow on their sons and by the practice of apprenticeships.8 Additionally, any patriarchal crisis could potentially have affected a gentleman’s relations with his wife, sons, daughters, servants, slaves, tenants, and neighbours, although some of these relationships are less likely to have extant written records. The situations of Landon Carter and Richard Henry Lee, two prominent gentlemen from Virginia’s Northern Neck, which are the main cases described in this chapter, offer extended illustrations of the domestic side of an English Atlantic political revolution. For these patriot gentlemen, the rupture of the imperial political family coincided with a crisis of authority within their own families. Few, if any, gentlemen left such openly cantankerous writings about such family squabbles as Carter, and Lee’s paternal challenges look very mild in comparison; nonetheless, concern over the possible collapse of both domestic and political authority must have occurred to most other Virginian gentlemen of the Revolutionary era.

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Demographic changes in the Chesapeake region by the eighteenth century had made possible the exercise of strong parental authority. The seventeenth-century ancestors of leading Virginians had witnessed a world of low life expectancy and youthful inheritance. Marriages frequently were broken by the death of a spouse, followed shortly thereafter by remarriage and a reconstitution of families that contained stepchildren and unrelated wards.9 Substantial improvements in life expectancy by the first decades of the eighteenth century, in turn, altered not only family composition, but also the foundation of familial authority. Additionally, as wealth and property became concentrated in the hands of a few leading families in the early eighteenth century, such fathers of fortune believed that maintaining control over family assets was a financial and familial necessity. Changing demographic facts had made this possible, but the overall absence of fathers and grandfathers in Virginia’s relatively recent past meant that orphaned sons-turned-fathers frequently lacked knowledge about how strong patriarchs should act or how they could exert power over their grown sons.10 Few Virginian gentlemen who became Revolutionary politicians had themselves experienced life as an adult son of a living father. Quite exceptionally, James Madison, Jr, was in his fifties when his father died, and Patrick Henry and Thomas Nelson, Jr, were in their thirties, but the fathers of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and George Washington died before the sons reached their mid-teens, and Benjamin Harrison and Richard Henry Lee lost their fathers before their twenty-fifth birthdays. Of this group, in 1776 only Madison’s father was living.11 The British and colonial constitutional disputes of the 1760s and 1770s raised serious questions about the foundation and limits of political authority, frequently with explicit reference to and even acceptance of the old analogy that imperial relations should parallel parent-child relations. There are numerous and well-known examples of patriot publications railing against Britain as a tyrannical parent and examples of British authorities characterizing rebelling colonists as spoiled, adolescent children.12 In a letter to London merchants in 1766, the Virginian George Mason complained that the “epithets of parent and child have been so long applied to Great Britain and her colonies … that … we rarely see anything from your side of the water free from the authoritative style of a master to a schoolboys [sic].”13 This familiar and un-Lockean analogy associating the state with a family, albeit a dysfunctional one, allowed patriots to express grievances without immediate expressions of disloyalty, especially if all parties agreed, in the Whig tradition, that absolute or unlimited obedience was contrary to natural law.14 Even the loyalist Jonathan Boucher would have conceded this premise.

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As much as colonial gentlemen would have recognized a distinction, in a Lockean and Whig sense, between parental and political authority, the analogy of the family as a government writ small remained very useful, particularly because the concept of family was so widely known. Family life provided a set of common developmental experiences that, to some degree, men and women of varying classes shared. Until recently, however, historians have portrayed family life as separate from American political history. Likewise, historical studies of the authority that white men exercised over wives, children, slaves, and neighbours have been compartmentalized into studies of marriage, family, slavery, and political culture.15 The resulting conceptual gulf between politics and domestic life might have seemed very strange to most eighteenthcentury contemporaries for whom “[f]amily government was the government.”16 For both gentlemen and freeholders, household government did not merely offer an analogy to help them understand the operation of public matters, but also shaped this understanding. Since democratic revolutions, at least from the perspective of those who spearhead the movements, threaten to spin out of control, patriot leaders wanted to justify their patriarchal rebellion against Parliament and the king while inhibiting any possible parallel rebellion against their authority as colonial politicians, gentlemen, and fathers. The conservative New England patriot John Adams, in an often-cited letter to his wife, observed that by 1776 the Revolution had caused the disobedience of many groups against local authorities: children, apprentices, students, Indians, slaves, and possibly wives, although he did mention children first.17 Like Adams, Virginians were not immune to speculation about the possible unsettling effects of revolution on domestic life and whether the world of politics might corrupt the sanctuary of the family. In preRevolutionary days, sons of wealthy gentlemen theoretically did not seek independence; rather, personal, economic independence was given to them by their fathers in the form of an estate.18 Yet it remained to be seen whether the rebelling gentry’s sons would internalize new political meanings of independence or whether filial bonds would stretch and break. The patriarchal ideal also faced challenges by women and slaves. Although not allowed to vote, elite women participated in Virginia’s political culture by influencing both their husbands’ political choices and their public reputations and by bringing property, the basis of male franchise, to the marriage. When a wealthy woman rejected the marriage proposals of a suitor, when she did not consent to her husband’s sale of dower lands, or when she controlled property of her late husband, she withheld the resources that men required to be patriarchs.19 The slave code of 1705 provided a legal framework to support elite dominance, but slaves continued to run

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away, resist, or revolt, although rarely in a coordinated fashion as in the 1730 rebellion, so planters could only approach their dream of hegemonic control through coercion. In the mid-1770s Virginians experienced heightened fear of slave insurrections, owing to several rumours of slave plots and the suspicion that the royal governor Lord Dunmore was promoting slave insurrections as a way to suppress patriot protests, even before his November 1775 proclamation promising freedom to slaves and servants of patriot masters who joined the British.20 The non-elite also had reason to be concerned about their domestic situations. Ordinary Virginians’ resistance to fighting in the militia, let alone in the Continental Army, may reflect their concern that as nonslaveholders they had more to lose at home; with no slaves to do their labour, they could not enter into extended military service without the fear of leaving their wives and children destitute.21 Revolutionary Virginia has long been depicted as remarkable for the absence of internal conflict in comparison with other colonies, and its gentlemen were largely successful in avoiding major internal schisms and maintaining political control throughout the Revolution.22 Gentlemen, as well as freeholders and labourers, would have learned much about the traditional operation of authority from face-to-face relations, conversations, and participation in community rituals at the courthouse or race track.23 Nonetheless, even in relatively conservative Virginia, the politicization of voters and the mobilization of male citizen soldiers shifted the basis of political authority. A high rate of legislative turnover coincided with popular objections to draft laws, and at the height of radicalism in 1775 and 1776, some members of prominent families were defeated and replaced by planters of middling fortune and lesser pedigree, even though as a group the local elite retained power.24 Those seeking election in Virginia, as elsewhere in the colonies, faced uncertain prospects, especially if they proved unwilling to embrace increasingly democratic attitudes.25 Robert Munford’s play The Candidates, written in 1770, provides a glimpse into both the political culture of colonial Virginia and the early Revolutionary crises in political authority. Its look at voting behaviour is so evocative that a number of historians have used it as evidence for a genteel, deferential, and harmonious style of politics in the pre-Revolutionary era.26 The five candidates with the transparent names Toddy, Strutabout, Smallhopes, Worthy, and Wou’dbe represent the extremes – self-indulgence and ostentation versus respectability and learning. In the play, the voters select the writer’s clear favourites, Worthy and Wou’dbe, thus reminding freeholders of their proper duty to vote according to an implicit reciprocal relationship. The gentry took on the real-life role of disinterested, virtuous stewards,

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and the freeholders were supposed to act their part by electing and obeying them. While this play may be interpreted as an overly idealized description of electoral politics, one can also see a possible prescriptive message, indicating that voters had not always been behaving as they ought. Robert Munford, a gentleman from Mecklenburg County, had been an early patriot, but it was probably his cautious nature and fear of civil war that caused freeholders to pass him over for more radical leaders in 1775. Munford’s own loss of political authority allowed him to sympathize with the two main characters of his lesser known play The Patriots, written in 1777.27 This play highlights two major themes: the perceived tyranny and hypocrisy of the local county committeemen and the failed romance between the daughter of Brazen, the chair of the committee, and the deserving, virtuous Trueman. As historian Michael McDonnell argues, this play aptly depicts Munford’s intertwined public and domestic anxieties about authority – specifically his concern that popular politics would not only undermine the traditional political authority of gentlemen, but could also lead to the decline of their domestic authority.28 In this literature, we can find the evocation of a tumultuous world where political and domestic concerns collided and where gentlemen feared the consequences. If Virginian gentlemen in the first half of the eighteenth century had to be ever vigilant to guard against challenges from wives, children, slaves, or voters, as historian Kathleen Brown emphasizes, then the “anxious patriarchs” had even more cause for concern by the 1760s and 1770s.29 As the Virginian elite fretted about the changing relationship between the governing and the governed and about how best to maintain their own political and social authority in a republican world, many also looked to their wives, children, servants, and slaves for signs of respect, obedience, and deference, which seemed so tenuous in the public arena.30 This was not a new strategy, but its Revolutionary expression offers a particularly poignant opportunity to search for connections between familial relations and Revolutionary events, between family history and political history. Historians of the family describe a number of controversial, coinciding transformations, including the collapse of seventeenth-century patriarchalism, the development of enlightened attitudes concerning childrearing, and the rise of the companionate marriage.31 Assessing how much of this presumed century-long change occurred in the Revolutionary generation is both difficult and disputed, despite the generalized belief of many historians that fathers lost authority in the Revolutionary era.32 Almost assuredly, the notion of a collapse of seventeenth-century patriarchalism cannot explain familial relations in the Chesapeake since too few seventeenth-century fathers and especially

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grandfathers lived to see their grown children for these men to warrant the collective title of strong patriarchs. Even if patriarchalism was an ideal, then, it could not have been a functioning reality, and it may have been noticeably enhanced in the eighteenth century.33 Transformations noted throughout the English Atlantic world varied regionally; local circumstances either enhanced or inhibited their expression. Virginia’s population growth and increased competition for lands and offices throughout the eighteenth century had meant that colonial fathers could not always provide adequately for their sons, and by mid-century the colonial elite had grown too numerous for the political positions available. In practical terms, these trends limited a colonial father’s power to be an ideal patriarch, even before the political crisis occurred, and they may likewise have influenced customs of filial obedience.34 Yet many elite sons would have perhaps relied more heavily on paternal bequests with the contraction of other local opportunities. Throughout the English empire, educational philosophies urging the nurturing of independent sons also potentially undermined patriarchalism, or at least excessive patriarchal claims to nearly total authority. The possible impact of the rise of companionate marriage on patriarchalism by the late eighteenth century is less certain; it may have served to enhance both parental and paternal authority if both parents worked together on common childrearing goals. Yet affluent fathers maintained legal guardianship rights and had the professional connections to place their sons in careers. Even if companionate marriage softened the edges of paternal authority, it did not alter these fundamental facts. Generalized claims that patriarchalism disintegrated after the Revolution may be overstated since the American Revolution itself did not overturn it as a governing principle in society. After achieving political independence, white men throughout the Thirteen Colonies spread their authority among fellow household heads through universal male suffrage, but more immediately, they set up new models of patriarchal authority, most notably with George Washington as president, for the republic to respect and emulate.35 Taking a long view of these protonational issues, patriarchal authority was enhanced as an idealized goal of these republican householders. Even changes in intestacy statutes, often cited as an egalitarian innovation favouring the next generation, did not limit a father’s power to dispose of his property by will however he chose.36 Additionally, much literature on the American South in the antebellum period has argued convincingly that patriarchalism constituted a vital concept in Southern culture, an argument inconsistent with any serious decline of patriarchalism in the Revolutionary era.37 The survival of patriarchalism in the early republic did not necessarily mean that Revolutionary contemporaries living through these

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events confidently shared this expectation. Genteel fathers might have sincerely believed that their paternal authority was in serious jeopardy and that, consequently, the very fabric of society was at risk, even if a longer historical view (which they could not have had) might interpret their Revolutionary crises with their offspring as hiccups in a longer countervailing trend. The sense of foreboding, or even immediate crisis, could have been more intense for elite southern planters. Their increased longevity in comparison with earlier generations and their control of increasingly scarce resources had finally enabled them to realize the ambitions of many elite Chesapeake fathers to be strong patriarchs at the very moment when the English Atlantic world was turning, however gradually and unevenly, toward less authoritarian attitudes about childrearing and family relations. What otherwise might have been seen as a multigenerational transition could have struck elite Virginian fathers in the moment as more immediate and radical given other Revolutionary shifts in political authority. Evidence from visitors to America seems to suggest that at least the fear of domestic chaos and declining parental power was real. During the Revolution and in the early nineteenth century, many foreign visitors and observers noted that American parents seemed to have lost control over their children. In turn, such accounts have influenced subsequent histories and modern interpretations. Although it is unclear to what specific region his remarks pertained, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “As soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day.”38 Earlier, in the 1770s, Nicholas Cresswell, an English observer of Virginia’s culture, also remarked on the local youth: “If they have any genius, it is not cramped in their infancy by being overawed by their parents. There is very little subordination observed in their youth. Implicit obedience to old age is not among their qualifications.”39 To many eyewitnesses, the prime culprits explaining youthful disobedience appeared to be republicanism and revolution. Landon Carter recorded an observation in 1772 that clearly connects his concern about childhood disobedience to pre-Revolutionary events: “to be sure, when Principles of order and society decline, other duties must, and I am much mistaken if duty to Parents is not within the scripture rule.”40 Perhaps the Revolution was merely the most obvious culprit, with individuals fearful of change blaming everything on it. Regardless of the reason, Revolutionary events heightened anxiety concerning the potential interconnectedness of the elite’s political and domestic worlds. A comparative biographical approach of two Virginian gentlemen, Landon Carter and Richard Henry Lee, based largely on their personal

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papers and letters, offers clues about the possible connections between their family lives and political lives. The source materials, however rich, are inconsistent: the Revolution provided opportunity for domestic and political worlds to collide, but those same tumultuous military and political events provided distractions and preoccupations that could keep parents from their families or from any serious recording, if not consideration, of family politics. Virginians did not produce an exhaustive flow of Revolutionary pamphlets or newspapers to serve as an ideological explanation for their political actions,41 let alone their childrearing principles, and even personal papers typically lack details about family matters. Some relationships are not well documented, and others are not even mentioned. Nonetheless, the gentlemen’s Revolutionary attitudes about political legitimacy, when juxtaposed with their domestic styles of governance (especially father-son relations), can help to reveal how they coped with any shifts in the nature of authority. Politicians debated fervently in Revolutionary days the role of popularity; some believed that catering to popular opinion jeopardized their claims to power, while others cheered egalitarian attitudes with which they had won political office themselves. Their views on political authority varied, as did their parental styles, although one cannot presume a clear and consistent correlation. Pragmatic gentlemen politicians, who had accommodated an expansion in popular politics, were not always inclined to welcome changes in their parent-child relationships. Born into one of the most prominent families in Virginia, Landon Carter (1710–78) no doubt expected to become a respected community leader. As the fourth son (third from his father’s second marriage), Landon normally could not have expected a large inheritance, except for his father’s immense wealth. Carter’s father, Robert “King” Carter owned one-third of a million acres and over 700 slaves at his death in 1732, a situation that allowed Landon to inherit a fraction that amounted to eight plantations. He added more properties by his marriages, and by the early 1740s, Landon Carter owned over 35,000 acres and more than 400 slaves.42 By all accounts, Robert “King” Carter was a strong patriarch, as the nickname implied. After acquiring his plantations in his early twenties, Landon likely tried to emulate what he knew of his father’s style of governance, including his careful management of his plantations and his family, as defined in the broadest sense to include slaves and servants as well as biological children. Landon Carter married three times: he and his first wife Elizabeth Wormeley, who died in 1740, had three sons and a daughter (Robert Wormeley, Landon, John, and Elizabeth); his second brief marriage to Maria Byrd, who died in 1744, gave him a daughter (Maria); and his third wife, Elizabeth Beale, gave birth

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to three daughters (Susannah, Lucy, and Judith) before dying in the mid-1750s. Seven of these children survived to adulthood.43 Landon’s diary, with entries from the 1750s to 1778, reveals a planter and father deeply involved in various aspects of plantation life. For almost all the years of his diary, he was a solitary parent, one whose decisions were neither shared with nor shaped by the children’s mothers, a situation that could have heightened his unilateral temperament. Considering his prominent family name, Landon expected that his authority at home would be paralleled by noteworthy positions of political influence in his county and country, a word that he used invariably to mean Virginia. Yet elective political office was not particularly easy for him to earn. His bids to be elected to the House of Burgesses had failed in 1735, 1742, and 1748, before he was elected in 1752. His performance in the 1755 election indicated widespread support among middling and wealthy voters as well as those propertyless voters permitted to vote, but by 1761 a declining, although still sufficient, percentage of voters endorsed him.44 To his chagrin, Carter did not find constituents from the Northern Neck unwavering in their political support. By the early 1770s, Landon Carter was no longer at the center of Virginian politics, although he considered himself among Virginia’s strongest patriots and a vocal opponent of the Stamp Act six months before Patrick Henry’s famous resolutions. His failure to be reelected in 1768, sixteen years after his first electoral victory, demonstrated, to him at least, a serious crisis in politics and a lack of necessary deference to elite politicians. His own explanation for this political defeat, which was recorded in his introspective diary in 1776, two years before his death, claimed that “[i]t was said that I did not familiarize myself among the People and because two elections after it was proved by my son’s going amongst them and Carrying his Election.” No doubt Carter’s interpretation of those 1768 events was coloured by his opinions on political change in 1776. His eldest son had acquired his old seat in 1770, only to lose it in 1776. Also in the elections in April of that year, Carter noted that a neighbour, Colonel Tayloe’s son-in-law, had suffered a similar fate, despite the candidate’s experience in Congress and the efforts of his father-in-law, who did “everything that a Gentleman might do.” Carter inferred that the victor was a lesser fellow and so argued, “But it is the nature of Popularity. She I long discovered to be an adulteress of the first order.”45 For Carter, the act of familiarizing himself among the people, or courting popular favour, was unacceptable political pandering. In his opinion, a lack of proper deference to traditional leaders jeopardized both the political struggle with Britain and the values of elite governance.

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Carter was not inclined to negotiate a new relationship with the voters as a way to maintain his personal political authority; neither was he predisposed to recognize an independent spirit in his own children. This might have been true with or without a revolution intervening in his life, if only because Carter’s personality was particularly cantankerous; his diary is filled with acerbic diatribes against his children and others who failed to accord him the respect that he felt he deserved. Nonetheless, the American Revolution did heighten his concerns about his duty as a father. As historian Rhys Isaac has put it, Carter opposed “the sovereignty of king-in-Parliament … but he was a jealous upholder of his own sovereignty at Sabine Hall.”46 He also characterized Anglo-American disagreements explicitly in terms of a mixed parentchild and slavery metaphor, arguing in 1774 and 1775 that “filial duty” and “cordial and filial respect” must decline when parents caused “their children to become slaves” or used “shackles too heavy.”47 Likewise, when Carter reflected on the interrelated issues of public leadership and patriarchal authority, he feared that his own influence as a father waned simultaneously with his losing status in the community.48 Carter’s long life provided abundant opportunities to exercise, or attempt to exercise, this parental sovereignty. As his diary reveals, Carter reserved his strongest words of reproach for his eldest son. More generally, the proper education for his sons and eldest grandson, suitable marriages for daughters and sons, as well as the morals of his grown offspring were all matters of grave concern and issues over which he felt that he should have considerable influence. Filial obedience, like voter deference, was never certain. Of his seven children, Landon Carter had an especially difficult relationship with his son Robert Wormeley Carter, and with Robert’s wife, Winifred Beale Carter, even though Landon noted that his other children had rebelled against him, one after another.49 Particularly disturbing to him was his belief that Winifred regularly encouraged Robert’s disobedience, an opinion that unleashed a tirade in his diary about woman as Eve.50 For two decades beginning in the mid-1750s, Robert, Winifred, and family all lived at Sabine Hall. Three generations under Landon’s roof increased his expectations that he could be a strong patriarch, but the unusual living arrangements heightened the rebelliousness and the escapist tendencies of the younger generations. The elder Carter complained not only about Robert’s “gambling and running about” and drinking, but also that he would be idle when he was home since he preferred sleeping to reading.51 Nonetheless, Landon chose not to give Robert plantation responsibilities, and he bristled at Robert’s criticisms of his management. Their cohabitation created countless moments of conflict, including a particularly infamous

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“domestic gust” in which the grandfather responded with his riding whip to little Landon’s impudence toward his mother, who was thrown into a rage by the old man’s interference. The elder Landon had a long memory when insulted, and despite having recorded the event at the time, he also remarked six years later on the matter as early evidence of the parents’ ruining young Landon, as well as proof of the superiority of his own patriarchal instincts.52 Concerning his sons’ education, Carter believed in 1770 that young men who went to England for an education were likely to be corrupted in the process, particularly by the English aristocratic preoccupation with luxury, or as he put it, the “foppishness of the fancy.” Although he had had a privileged education in England himself, he chose to send his sons to the College of William and Mary.53 On this point, Carter appears to echo the sentiment of Virginian John Page, who fifteen years earlier refused his sons an English education because, as his son claimed, “several Virginians, about this time, had returned from that place … so inconceivable [sic] illiterate, and also corrupted and vicious, that he swore no son of his should ever go there in quest of an education.”54 Carter’s political disapproval of British actions following 1765 may have heightened his longstanding objections to an English education, but one suspects that his need for face-to-face interaction and control of his children also required their continued residency in Virginia. Still, he did not consider the Virginian school exactly a bastion of virtue either, for he believed that his grandson Landon’s attendance there was only improving his “talk for trifling and loungings.”55 Carter noted that young men should not have a horse of their own, for it only made them vain to imagine themselves upon it, as well as neglectful of their studies.56 He preferred to send a horse when one was needed, a trait that reveals his dual goal of controlling plantation affairs, including all livestock, as well as wanting to know as much as possible about the comings and goings of family members. Independence of movement thwarted patriarchal control. Not even Carter’s usually obsequious son-in-law Robert Beverley shared his ideas on public or family governance. Beverley was not active in public affairs, as was customary for men of his social standing; although he initially opposed the Stamp Act, he later was censured for not signing boycott associations. As Beverley preferred to find fault with both sides and proposed a negotiated reconciliation, his relations with Carter continued to deteriorate.57 On matters of family governance, Beverley and Carter disagreed as well. When Carter’s daughter Lucy (Beverley’s sister-in-law) wanted to visit a friend in Maryland and Carter refused her permission, Beverley practically accused his fatherin-law of authoritarianism and hypocrisy, as well as forgetting his

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youthful fondness for diversions. Beverley’s comment that “Parents are under as great Obligations to render themselves agreeable to their Children, as the Children can be to them,” must have struck Carter as an explicit criticism of his parenting style.58 Carter’s extreme patriarchalism could not be easily sustained as the children grew, particularly because he could not control their marriages. In choosing spouses, Carter’s children usually did not please their father; their potential marriages carried high risks for themselves, but also for the patriarch, as it tended to be an act of growing independence rather than obedience. His son Landon Carter’s “Sauntering about” in 1757 to visit a woman whom the elder Landon said he would “never Consent to his marrying” was characterized melodramatically as “so Singular an act of great filial disobedience in a Child that I have thought once my greatest happyness [sic] but as a just Father kept it concealed.”59 As Rhys Isaac convincingly argues, old Landon held two visions of family life: he wanted to be both the “unquestioned patriarch” of ancient times and the more modern “caring father and grandfather in keeping with the sensibility of the times.”60 One wonders, however, to what extent his approach was gender-specific, as Carter later in life expressed great affection for his daughters and longed for their visits.61 Perhaps this was the result of his daughters’ more easily or frequently exhibiting traits of respect than their brothers, or at least more so than Robert, whose ingratitude increasingly struck his father as an egregious failing.62 One letter from Elizabeth gushed with sentiment; she expressed little else, other than her “endeavour to perswade” her father that no one took greater pleasure “in paying their Duty” to him.63 Even if such effusive words of respect potentially followed a disagreement, it indicated what tone she thought her father expected. Carter’s longing to see daughters Judith and Lucy may also have stemmed from their reconciliation. In both cases, the women’s marriages had led to a father-daughter rift. In Judith’s case, estrangement resulted from her eloping against her father’s will and marrying Reuben Beale (brother to Winifred, Robert Wormeley’s wife), whom Carter considered a man of inadequate wealth and “unsound by birth.” In Lucy’s case, the argument consisted of a shorter disagreement about her legal rights in the event of her husband’s death.64 Landon Carter’s writings about these marriages suggest that he may have consciously evaluated whether he should act as a stern patriarch or a modern, affectionate father. Initially very pleased that William Colston was courting Lucy, Carter wrote that he had told Colston that he “had long attached my good wishes to him. But as a Parent I never took any Liberty with a child but to dissuade where I thought I had reason so to do; but in no instance Whatever to Persuade. Therefore her

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approbation must Proceed from his own conduct and her good liking.”65 Carter certainly meant that daughters should have veto rights if they opposed a particular suitor, but he also used the opportunity to portray himself as an enlightened father. Was it a mask he used to convince a worthy potential son-in-law? If it was an illusion, it was also a delusion; Carter seemed to believe it. Merely four months later, Carter found it necessary to press his intended son-in-law concerning the dowry so as to improve legal protections for Lucy in the event of her husband’s death. Carter complained that Colston had not treated him as a gentleman, and he seemed genuinely grieved that Lucy “seems to suspect her father,” although he swore to God, “I mean nothing but a real Parental care.”66 He had acted as a stern negotiator, although he claimed that his intentions were well meant. By his own admission, however, Carter was able to upset Lucy in a situation where he actually had approved of the union. The rift with “Poor offending” Judy, whom Carter claimed had “made a hard bed … [by] her deception,” was not so easily mended.67 Carter’s frequent complaints about his children suggest that these relationships were a source of considerable anxiety and anger for him and that his idealized self-identity as a respected patriarch could not be achieved. When one also considers his numerous complaints about slaves and overseers being lazy and disobedient, the image of Landon as a frustrated patriarch becomes even clearer.68 That neighbours did not always act in a deferential manner and that political matters did not go as he wanted added a public layer and larger meaning to domestic disagreements. Carter would have agreed with Jonathan Boucher that children generally were less obedient; he wrote of the folly of the “rising generation,” who “fancy their knowledge exceeds experience.” About his servant Beale, Landon wrote that “the first instance he walks alone, he is to tell me how to step.”69 Carter was particularly irked when riding in a chariot that the youth no longer deferred to his judgment and age concerning whether he preferred the window raised or lowered; instead, the aged were subject to the whims of the “young Polites.”70 These were all troublesome signs of the times. Like the numerous and interconnected Carters, Lee family members spread into several counties of Virginia and acquired a variety of appointed local positions or were elected as burgesses. More unusually, the Lee family’s interests in tobacco cultivation, mercantile affairs, and speculation in western lands dovetailed into a transatlantic commercial business that relied on individual family members in Virginia and London. Typically, tobacco planters of the Northern Neck depicted their interactions with London merchants as based on both

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friendship and commerce, an indication of intermingling market values and social imperatives.71 The relationship was even more intimate and complex for the Lees, whose members were both planters and merchants. Likewise, matters of family governance were historically more diffused since supervision of young men coming of age paralleled this transatlantic business model. Not only did Richard Henry Lee (1732–94) depend on his younger brothers Arthur and William for their business acumen in London, but when he sent his two oldest sons to be educated in London and later Europe, the uncles also acted as surrogate parents. Their letters combine the transatlantic details of family business and the business of the family. Richard Henry Lee, the fourth-born child (third son) of Thomas Lee and Hannah Ludwell, probably learned much about family governance and authority from observing and experiencing both his father’s and his eldest brother’s patriarchal styles. Richard Henry’s recent biographer depicts Thomas as both a “stern” and “doting” parent, but in his public life, he may have struck neighbours as more imperious. He had refused to resign as vestryman of Cople Parish when he moved to Stratford, the family home in another parish, and his related fellow vestrymen continued to pursue his interests. After his death, the vestry petitioned the House of Burgesses to dissolve the entire vestry so as to allow them to select new members and rid themselves of the late Lee’s influence. Family lore depicts Hannah as a capable plantation manager in the absence of her husband.72 While at school in England, Richard Henry learned of his mother’s death in January 1750 and his father’s demise in November of the same year, events that empowered Philip, the eldest son, principal heir and executor of Thomas Lee’s estate. Philip exhibited an authoritarian style, or so it certainly seemed to his siblings, who chafed at Philip’s demands, however insignificant, for decades to follow.73 Yet at no time did he likely seem more arbitrary to Richard Henry than when Philip broke his brother’s engagement to Edward Porteus’s daughter in England when Richard Henry did not return to America upon his father’s death; in a letter to the young woman’s father, Philip indicated that while he had great esteem for the lady, his brother’s estate would support only him alone.74 In 1754 Richard Henry supported his young siblings in their suit against Philip, who had not completed divisions of their father’s property. The suit was not successful, but Frank, Alice, William, and Arthur did manage to have their cousin Henry Lee named as their legal guardian instead of Philip. Philip claimed that he could not divide the estate until all outstanding debts had been paid, but his continued spending and extensive improvement of Stratford Hall suggested other motives to his siblings.75

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Although an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Philip persisted among his brothers and sisters beyond the division of the paternal real estate, Richard Henry received his Prince William County property from his father’s will in 1757. He leased this land and for a time lived with his bride Anne Aylett at Stratford Hall, the family homestead and then the residence of as-yet-unmarried Philip. On leased land adjacent to Philip’s in Westmoreland County, Richard Henry began the construction of Chantilly; in 1763 the couple moved there with sons Thomas and Ludwell, and soon daughters Mary and Hannah followed. Illness took Anne’s life in late 1768, when the eldest boys were ten and eight years old. Richard Henry married the second Mrs Anne Lee (formerly Anne Gaskins Pinckard), whom he once described affectionately, yet with some anxiety, as “a teaming little wife.” They had an additional two sons and three daughters between 1770 and 1782.76 The demands of an increasing family heightened Lee’s concern to find a governmental position with a salary that could supplement his other income from tobacco profits and tenants’ rents. Membership in the House of Burgesses did not meet this goal, although his election, first in 1755, had contributed to a Lee voting bloc that persisted for decades. Yet his political service also kept him away from home, a pattern common for men of his rank, and a situation that likely tugged on the heart strings as well as the purse strings. Lee described in 1778 his reluctance to return to Williamsburg until he had “heard every little story” from his children.77 That year his paternal influence expanded beyond his own brood. After the deaths of brothers Philip and Thomas Ludwell in 1775 and 1778, Richard Henry as the eldest male heir managed all three plantations, cared for the widows, and probably assumed the role of second father for their children.78 Nonetheless, his political business in Williamsburg and Philadelphia meant that he was physically separated from the children for prolonged periods throughout the Revolution. Twenty-two years younger than Landon Carter, Richard Henry Lee represents not only a younger generation, but also a different understanding of the nature of political authority. Whereas Carter’s political career ended by the late 1760s, Lee found in the Revolution an avenue for public acclaim and service, most notably in the House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress. Unlike Carter, Lee did not oppose the politicization of Virginia’s electorate; as a member of the House of Burgesses and later a delegate to the Continental Congress, he owed his success to riding that wave of political change. Before the Revolution, by supporting measures to lower suffrage requirements and by acting against John Robinson, a former Speaker of the House of Burgesses and colonial treasurer who had lent money from the treasury to

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influential families, Lee had cultivated for himself a popular political image as an opponent of aristocratic corruption. Nonetheless, it seems that Lee would have preferred an appointed seat on the governor’s council, rather than his elected position in the Assembly. As Lee confided to his brother in 1770, he had “many reasons … against continuing a popular Candidate any longer,” and by 1775 he commented that the Virginia Council had too many “raw boys and hotheaded senseless people … It is absolutely necessary that some grave sensible Men should now be placed there in order to temper the present body.”79 Elite governance was crucial to Lee’s vision of Virginian politics and society, but his Revolutionary views allowed considerable room for cooperation with voters of lesser social orders. In his disputes with his tenants over the terms of rent payments, Lee insisted that he be paid in specie but eventually negotiated with his tenants, moderated his demands, and agreed to accept paper money and then produce as acceptable forms of payment.80 Such pragmatism recognized not only the scarcity of specie, but also that the non-exportation campaigns had deprived tenants of their income from the sale of agricultural produce and that soldiers were paid only in paper currency. Opposing elite landlords denounced his actions, even though Lee acted in a manner likely intended to reduce the risk of insurrection. He recognized that the lack of salt could lead to “universal riot and convulsion,” particularly in a context of local rioting about the organization of the Revolutionary army and the unpopular military demands made on the lower sort.81 He had even led a popular protest in Westmoreland County against the stamp agent, George Mercer, in 1765, a particularly odd situation given that he had earlier applied for this position.82 Lee adopted the radical, democratic principles of the Revolution and was pleased in June 1776 that Virginia’s new state constitution was “very much of the democratic kind.” Still, Lee did not consistently bow to every popular opinion. He was vigorous in his support of some unpopular measures; in the 1770s and 1780s he encouraged programs of vigorous taxation, the payment of British debts, and mild treatment of loyalists.83 In 1781 he was one of those who supported the idea of making George Washington a virtual dictator in Virginia in order to restore order and authority.84 Richard Henry Lee’s political style permitted an expansion of democratic attitudes without a rejection of cherished principles of elite governance. In his interactions with his children, one can also see a flexible patriarchal style that more easily permitted expressions of affection. Nonetheless, if Lee actually shared with Carter an idealized dream of domestic tranquility, Lee was not able to attain it either. His relationships with most of the children are not well documented, but

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enough evidence survives to show that the eldest son, in particular, was a challenge. Like other gentlemen of his day, Lee considered it his fatherly duty to ensure that his sons had a proper education. In writing to their sons, such fathers reminded them that paying attention to their studies was a demonstration not only of filial obedience, but also of affection toward their fathers. Likewise, a lack of obedience might result in a withdrawal of parental affection as well as financial support.85 In his letters to his sons, Lee insisted on his affection for his children, but he also stated quite directly that such affection depended on their continued obedience.86 Unlike Carter, Lee did not find it necessary for his children to be educated in Virginia. Lee wrote disparagingly about the College of William and Mary and decided to send his two oldest sons, Thomas and Ludwell, to England. The young men’s uncles, William and Arthur Lee, took considerable interest in the boys’ education and practical training, although Arthur had initially advised against the boys’ coming to London.87 Perhaps the distance and especially the sharing of responsibilities with his brothers reduced any possibility for Richard Henry to act in an authoritarian manner. Still, William and Arthur recognized that final decisions about the boys’ activities rested squarely with their father. In 1772, when they were fourteen and twelve years old, Richard Henry had intended “Thomas for the Church, and Ludwell for the Bar.” He communicated “with true parental warmth [that t]heir welfare you may be sure is deeply at my heart.” He also clearly outlined the practicalities: their education in the northern colonies of British America could amount to £100 annually, but the “sum beyond which I cannot afford now to go, is £30. sterling apiece for Board clothing, and education.” As for their clothing, Richard Henry made a special point that the “boys must be very frugally clothed. The plainest, to be decent, will please me much the best … a small estate must part with nothing unnecessary.”88 Although he mentioned St Bees, he feared that it was too far from William and worried about the possibility of some evil befalling the boys if they were not closely monitored. A vague reference from Arthur suggests that Richard Henry’s concern was not merely hypothetical; in September 1772 Arthur wrote, “I am extremely sorry to hear what you mention of your son, but as he is young I hope attention & advice may yet eradicate the seeds of vice & implant virtue in their place.”89 Although the details of this transgression, however large or small, are unclear, it suggests that the adults took seriously the need for careful monitoring and guidance. Still, the boys were well behaved enough for William to declare them “really such excellent children, that I feel a particular pleasure in having the care of them.”90

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By 1777 plans had changed. Lee expressed his pleasure that his sons and brothers had left England for France and so were safely removed from “a Country (England) where every consideration of virtue and justice, is sacrificed to wicked resentment and views of Tyranny.”91 Just a few years earlier, he had believed an English education superior to an American one, but political events had caused him to reevaluate this position, and by 1783 Lee affirmed the “propriety of preferring” Virginia’s schools.92 On the Continent, beginning in 1777, Arthur was serving as one of three commissioners to the French government, and William became Congress’s commercial agent at Nantes and later moved his family to Brussels until the end of the war. Unofficially, the brothers continued to monitor both the practical training and book learning of Thomas and Ludwell. In several letters in the spring of 1777, Richard Henry referred to a new plan: that Thomas should be employed as William’s clerk or at Mr Sweighauser’s Counting House in Nantes, and thereby learn the French language and business, and that Ludwell should “go deep into the study of Natural and Civil law, and Eloquence” as well as the military arts so that he could eventually “turn either to the law or the Sword” in Virginia. However, wartime disruptions in commerce meant that Richard Henry could not send remittances, so all depended on William’s ability to pay “for their frugal maintenance in France.”93 Particularly given these financial circumstances, Richard Henry urged William six months later again to pursue whatever plan he thought best in terms of its “œconomy & solid good for them.”94 Richard Henry Lee fretted in his correspondence about the exercise of his parental duties, made difficult by distance and finances. Not only was he separated from the two oldest sons, but his long service in Congress also kept him away from the younger children at Chantilly for months at a time. Lee considered his political activities an essential duty of the elite, but he longed for retirement and noted that his plantation affairs and his family were disadvantaged, even suffering, by his absence.95 Lee reiterated that he had only a modest fortune, which the war made more precarious. In this context of worrisome parental finances, the spending habits of Richard Henry’s eldest son may not be seen exactly as outright rebellion, but they did constitute a vexing challenge to his father’s values as well as resources. In correspondence between Richard Henry, Arthur, and William, these Revolutionary gentlemen defined not only the purpose of an elite young man’s education, but also the permissible extravagances and the necessary obedience owed to a parent. A particularly rich exchange involves young Thomas Lee’s request for silver buckles and the decision of William and Arthur to send silver-plated ones that

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would last a few years until Thomas was grown, in case the fashions might then be changed. The modest budget of Richard Henry, he claimed and his brothers reiterated, did not permit such extravagances, so the uncles indulged their nephew. By 1777 the nineteenyear-old Thomas was spending so lavishly on apparel that, his uncle charged, the young man had spent in seven months so much on clothing (despite his already having a new silk-lined suit from Paris, velvet breeches, and some shirts with ruffles) that his clothing bills matched his brother’s total educational expenses for an entire year. They also worried, quite typically, about his pastimes and the character of his acquaintances. Family members discussed whether it would be best to send Thomas back to America, where his father would have a more direct influence, but feared that Richard Henry’s “public business” would prevent him from “paying any attention to him, so that possibly he might be worse employed in America.”96 In the letters concerning Thomas’s expenses, we can see how the three elder Lee brothers were attempting to teach the next generation what they perceived to be proper genteel values, including fiscal selfrestraint. Writing in September 1777, William Lee explained to Richard Henry, “L’s [Ludwell’s] expences are moderate, but I fear Thom’s has been otherwise at this place, tho’ I have not yet ask’d from Mr. Schweighausers Acct, not being quite convenient to discharge it. Your admonitions of Industry and frugallity may not be of disservice. Their expences in England were as reasonable as you could wish.” At that point, William suspected that his nephew Thomas had recently overspent, a fact later confirmed when he requested the bill. His lack of industry, or laziness, may have been just as troubling, so William urged Richard Henry to act decisively by composing a fatherly letter of advice or reprimand. Two months later, William’s letter to Richard Henry had a more exasperated tone. The bill was larger than first feared. William blamed Arthur, who forgot to set a limit on Thomas’s expenses in Nantes, which set off a chain of events of considerable concern, especially because William noted that he had seen young men ruined who had access to too much money. William described Thomas’s spending with a mixture of sarcasm, anger, and disappointment: “I am told he [Thomas] conceived himself that he was heir to a very large and capital Estate when he became of age … this ruinous mistake I have endeavoured to correct in him, & it might not be a miss for you to give him some information on this head.”97 This is the second time in just over two months that William had implored Richard Henry to write to his son with stern words. Perhaps Richard Henry had not followed through on the first request, or maybe William was sufficiently annoyed that he, deliberately or not, repeated himself.

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In this exchange and in the letters concerning the buckles, the uncles were urging fiscal restraint as a necessary quality for a young gentleman. Earlier, Arthur had noted that the set of inferior buckles sent were similar to the pair he once had, the only pair that he had until the age of thirty, so he expected Thomas to accept them as sufficient for a young man of his position. Since he made reference to his own history, Arthur must have remembered the financial circumstances that he had faced himself as a young man in London in the 1760s under the care of Ann, a cousin, and her husband James Russell. Philip, then Arthur’s guardian, had left strict instructions that Arthur should receive one suit for winter and another for summer and no more, and Arthur had even been required to pay for some genteel lessons himself.98 Perhaps Philip’s approach as a guardian had made Arthur more understanding or even lenient with young Thomas. At least in this case, Arthur had tried to reason with and persuade his nephew instead of commanding him, even though the issue of the buckles was obviously a trifling one. Still, it was symptomatic of the young man’s more serious traits of acquisitiveness. Arthur also cautioned that Thomas should care for the buckles diligently as a token of esteem toward the giver, emphasizing the necessary social imperatives. What Thomas thought of the buckles incident, if it mattered much to him at all, cannot be known. His uncles thought that their repeated urgings of fiscal restraint were not being heard, but Thomas might have tried to explain that he was learning the deportment as well as the dress of French gentlemen, valuable social skills if he expected to have a future career from America trading with French merchants. That Ludwell’s expenses were modest suggests that the elder Thomas was more interested in playing the role of a gentleman of means, or perhaps the values of frugality were lost on him. With his extravagant spending on clothing, Thomas may have been trying to impress his male and female acquaintances with evidence of his taste, refinement, and social position.99 The resistance that Thomas faced from his father and his two surrogate fathers may have been proportional to his spending, but their negative reaction had been magnified by what they perceived to be insecure financial times. Richard Henry had long complained of having only a small estate, but given the collapse of transatlantic commerce and the unreliability of his Virginian incomes, his worries about financial insecurity increased. He expressed not only personal fiscal concern, but also a social criticism with his comment in 1780 that the “times are amazingly expensive, more so by far than my means to hold pace with the general extravagance.”100 Extravagance was dangerous, and careless spending could jeopardize Richard Henry’s ability to educate his two eldest sons and their younger siblings.

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Meanwhile, Thomas’s younger brother Ludwell had less ink devoted to him in the family correspondence, probably since he created fewer problems, but Arthur and Richard Henry remarked repeatedly, although briefly, on both Ludwell’s intelligence and potential. In a matter-of-fact fashion that did not compliment Thomas, Arthur remarked that Ludwell, then attending a Paris academy to learn “Engineering & the art military … is a fine Boy, & will I hope be of service to his Country. Tom, who is not so brilliant, I have trusted to the care of Mr. Sweighauser at Nantes to learn merchandise.”101 Perhaps each uncle had a favourite nephew: Arthur remarked on the “worth and amiableness” of “our Boy Ludwell,” whereas William took at least some credit for “our boy Thom.” Nonetheless, William likewise recognized in late 1778 that Ludwell “has a good genius … [and] will do very well,” whereas Thom “improves a good deal” but must be thought trustworthy since his employer was involving him in “active business.”102 By the spring of 1778, Ludwell was reading law with Arthur, who had taken up its study several years earlier, and Richard Henry shared Arthur’s joy in the young man’s accomplishments. Ludwell’s light was shining brightly in comparison to Thomas, about whom his father wrote: “It grieves me extremely to hear of the indolence and extravagance of my son Thom. They are qualities the direct reverse of those that must carry him thro life, if he passes with honor and ease to himself.” Still, he hoped that William’s attention, Arthur’s advice, and Richard Henry’s own letters to him “will work a change.”103 Such a transformation, at least from the adults’ perspective, was not immediate; in a 1779 proposal that Thom might travel in Holland, France, or Spain to establish necessary business contacts before returning to America, if William thought the expense warranted, Richard Henry urged that Thomas “should be impressed before he goes on such a Tour, if he does go, with the necessity of much gravity, sobriety, and attention to business wherever he is.”104 He believed that Thomas still needed to be reminded of his duty. The comparisons between Thomas and Ludwell were implicit in this correspondence, and given Richard Henry’s scarce resources, the three senior brothers must have considered where the money would best be spent. Typically, the first-born son could expect the largest share of the inheritance and a fine education, and Thomas’s indiscretions never seemed to jeopardize plans for his mercantile training. Yet Ludwell’s talents and disposition had their own appeal. In an egalitarian outburst that reflected both his financial worries and perhaps his confidence in Ludwell’s stronger prospects, Richard Henry reminded Arthur “that I have a large family, and that I wish to do the equal justice” yet would like to “assist Ludwells [sic] genius and application” for

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the service of his country. As Richard Henry continued to elaborate ten days later, “the justice I owe my other children will not allow very great partiality in expense on any one or two – Yet I would not withhold what may be necessary for good foundations.”105 Nothing else would be just or consistent with republican equality; Ludwell would not be disadvantaged, but neither would Thomas be privileged. When William eventually sent Thomas to Virginia in late October 1779, the uncle explained that although he could no longer afford to keep him there, Thomas already had sufficient knowledge of French commerce, and without capital in Europe, he was likely to find more opportunity in America. William insisted that “had he been my own Son,” he would not have acted differently.106 Ludwell was still with Arthur in April 1780 but returned to America shortly thereafter, practised law, and was elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates and later became Speaker of the Virginia Senate in 1800.107 Thomas had become a member of Virginia’s state senate by 1785. Later, newspaper reports that Thomas and his uncle Francis favoured the proposed Constitution, contrary to Richard Henry, provided a public opportunity to ridicule Richard Henry, even though it is unclear whether the reported disagreement was real.108 While it does not appear that the young, spendthrift Thomas was necessarily trying to challenge parental authority directly and while his uncles did not characterize his behaviour as rebellious in the same manner that Landon Carter chronicled his eldest son’s acts of disobedience as domestic rebellions, the juxtaposition of Richard Henry’s political life and republican attitudes with his son’s efforts to achieve gentility suggests a generation gap exacerbated by the Revolution. While Thomas was earning a reputation in the family as a spendthrift, in America Richard Henry Lee was urging republican frugality. As a delegate to the Continental Congress, Richard Henry had supported this body’s resolves in October 1778 to end theatre, horse racing, gambling, and other unproductive, expensive, and aristocratic diversions. Such actions caused one of his biographers to describe him as acting “more like a Massachusetts Puritan than a Virginia Cavalier.”109 Indeed, Lee valued frugality and Spartanism; in a letter to John Adams, he wrote that the “hasty, unpersevering, aristocratic genius of the south suits not my disposition, and is inconsistent with my ideas of what must constitute social happiness and security.”110 One might well expect that Richard Henry, or Arthur given his political activism,111 would have opposed Thomas’s extravagance and spending with explicit references to American nonimportation campaigns and Continental Congress resolves. That they did not make the link explicit in their correspondence may suggest that they perceived this issue to be a private matter and one of childrearing; nonetheless, it also reflects gentlemen’s common letter-writing conventions of addressing family

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matters in a separate, often final, paragraph, separated physically and topically from discussions of public issues. In their public statements, Arthur and Richard Henry recognized the real political consequences of extravagant consumerism. Landon Carter and Richard Henry Lee opposed many of the diversions of young Virginians, especially lavish spending and gambling, that risked the family’s financial security and position.112 Rising rates of planter indebtedness caused many contemporaries to note that excess seemed too common, and a few well-known examples of prominent young squanderers, such as William Byrd III, had a huge psychological impact on the gentry.113 Carter and Lee recognized the need for reform within the Virginian elite and so shared certain antiaristocratic sentiments by the 1770s, but their children sometimes clung quite tenaciously to aristocratic habits, which they interpreted as an integral part of cavalier culture. Although historians may be accustomed to envisioning a transition from strong paternal values to affectionate relations, from aristocratic dispositions to egalitarian ones, the lived experience is more complex. As much as he seemed a traditionalist, Landon Carter straddled two paradigms, an ancient world of controlling patriarchs and a new world of enlightened fathers, as Isaac recently argues.114 Carter’s political defeats did not appear to shake his confident belief in either political deference or filial obedience, even if he did occasionally claim to try a lenient, softer approach with some of his adult children. His regular characterization of their disobedience as rebellion and his laments about declining obedience in Revolutionary times suggest that he was more explicit than Lee in making links between the private and the public. Richard Henry Lee had more qualities of an affectionate father – peppered with stern, although distant, ultimatums denouncing careless spending – but his authority seemed to be commanded rather than demanded in private, as in the public sphere. In politics, Lee did not have the same difficulties as Carter in attaining and retaining elective office. Carter’s diary chronicles constant problems with slaves and servants. Lee’s papers do not emphasize this concern, although his Revolutionary absences may partially explain the silence; he did, however, display an ability to negotiate with tenants. Unfortunately, evidence about their interactions with women, especially their wives, is scarce. For most of Carter’s diary, he was a widower, but arguments with his resident daughter-in-law reveal his inclination, when angered, to see woman as Eve. Richard Henry’s correspondence reveals no evidence of underlying patriarchal rage toward women; he mentions his wives rarely but affectionately, and he appears to respect his older sister Hannah. After her husband’s death, Hannah lived with her lover

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and in so doing did not have to surrender her rights to her husband’s property. This living arrangement did not alienate her from Richard Henry, although he was the chief executor of her late husband’s estate, and he even agreed with her complaint that it was unfair that widows paid property taxes but could not vote.115 In their interactions with dependants – slaves, tenants, servants, or women – Carter and Lee may have exhibited the patriarchal styles that each employed in their relationships with their children. Carter expected obedience from everyone, but others rarely met his expectations, and his offspring disappointed him regularly. Lee’s parenting of his two oldest boys was more adaptive, less authoritarian; he was an active, involved parent who was determined to correct aberrant behaviour in Thomas, although he did not globalize about its significance or explicitly connect its meaning to public affairs. Historians may be inclined to depict the Revolutionary generation as more radical, more modern than its predecessors, but these challenging children of Revolutionaries seem more traditional, more inclined to hang on to elite social values and the trappings of gentility, and more anxious to define themselves according to yesterday’s models than to embrace newer Revolutionary values of frugality and simplicity. Writing well after the American Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that as “the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day.” He assured his reader that such an independent spirit was not forged out of internal, domestic strife, for American fathers could not deny to their sons the same rights that they had asserted for themselves. “It would be an error to suppose that this is preceded by a domestic struggle in which the son has obtained by a sort of moral violence the liberty that his father refused him. The same habits, the same principles, which impel the one to assert his independence predispose the other to consider the use of that independence as an incontestable right.”116 In Tocqueville’s opinion, not only were the democratic attitudes in post-Revolutionary America inconsistent with an absolutist or extreme patriarchal style of parenting in a theoretical sense, but American fathers actually recognized the contradiction and facilitated independence in their sons as they became adults. Intergenerational struggles over personal independence were unnecessary and unrepublican. Boucher’s comment, described earlier, that children were not as obedient as they used to be and ought to be and Tocqueville’s assessment may both be seen as exaggerations, although in opposite directions. Each commentator assumed that the Revolutionary spirit of the times had altered family relations – encouraging insubordination in children, according to Boucher, or facilitating liberal and freedom-granting attitudes among

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parents and more affectionate father-son relations, according to Tocqueville.117 Both men had either the luxury, or the disadvantage, of distance: Tocqueville wrote decades later as a foreign traveller, and Boucher as a loyalist exile quite possibly revised his 1773 sermon (or at least decided on its inclusion in his published anthology in the 1790s). Neither Boucher’s nor Tocqueville’s perspectives likely captured very well the attitudes of those gentlemen who had tried to raise children in America during the entire Revolutionary era. Not only did such American patriots have concerns about the outcome of the contest and the safety of their families, but as community leaders, they also feared that the shifts in the nature of authority would inhibit their ability to pass along their social and political status to their sons. Many of these concerns added to preexisting fears about the negative consequences of gentrification. Parental concerns about excessive gambling or about the ostentatious spending of sons reflected implicit antiaristocratic attitudes that predated the political struggle, but in the context of a republican revolution, both children’s behaviours and parental responses took on added significance. Robert Munford’s and Landon Carter’s respective political defeats heightened their anxiety about their domestic authority and about whether they could retain the obedience of their dependants, especially after they had lost the deference of the voters. For Richard Henry Lee, his political success during the Revolution owed a good deal to his embracing a new political environment characterized by popular sovereignty. This flexible, pragmatic leadership style may have assisted him in raising his sons, but he still faced difficulties transmitting his values to them, particularly since Thomas may have preferred older, more aristocratic values. The Revolution magnified perennial problems between fathers and sons, to some extent exaggerating and politicizing even minor, expected disputes. This is not to say that conflict characterized father-son relations in the Revolution but that the general, national domestic harmony that Tocqueville described or imagined, and to which many contemporary gentlemen aspired, would not have been possible during the American Revolution, a time when patriots were challenging the foundations of political legitimacy and so experienced parallel concerns about possible unwanted changes in their domestic authority.

notes 1 This chapter has benefited from suggestions kindly made by Kenneth Lockridge, Michael McDonnell, John Murrin, and Ian Steele, who read earlier versions. All shortcomings remain my responsibility. I also acknowledge research

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support from an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society (hereafter vhs) and from a research fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution (hereafter dlar). Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution; in thirteen discourses, preached in North America between the years 1763– 1775, (1797; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 309–10; and quoted in Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972): 167–306 at 266–7. The texts of those colonial sermons probably did not survive Boucher’s flight into exile, so subsequent events may have shaped the content of the sermons published more than twenty years later; see Anne Young Zimmer and Alfred F. Kelly, “Jonathan Boucher: Constitutional Conservative,” Journal of American History 58 (1972): 897–922 at 899; Anne Young Zimmer, Jonathan Boucher: Loyalist in Exile (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 263–312; and James B. Bell, “Anglican Quill-Drivers in Eighteenth Century America,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 44 (1975): 23–45 at 34. Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (1658) was widely read in the eighteenth century; Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949). On Filmer, see Boucher, View of the Causes, 522–30. On Whig, Lockean, and Puritan contractualist understandings of natural law and parental authority and the view that it was no longer popular by mid-eighteenth century to explain royal authority by way of an analogy to parental power, see Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution,” 169–89. Locke’s popular book Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) asserted that childhood, as a temporary stage of development, meant that parental control should be temporary and that prolonged parental control would inhibit development; see James Axtell, ed., The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 145. Zimmer and Kelly, “Jonathan Boucher,” 897–9, challenge this view that Boucher’s ideas are derivative of Filmer, whereas Winthrop Jordan and Peter Laslett accept this view. See Winthrop D. Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History 60 (1973): 294–308 at 300; Peter Laslett, “Sir Robert Filmer: The Man versus the Whig Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly (henceforth wmq) 3rd ser. 5 (1948): 523–46 at 523. For brief, sensitive explanations of patriarchy, patriarchal authority, paternalism, and the multiple uses of patriarchy from political theory, feminist theory, family history, and the history of slavery, see especially Kenneth Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth

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Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992) 90, 98; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), 4–5, 322–3; and Anthony S. Parent, Jr, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 199–200. On hiring out (or putting out) children, especially sons (a practice less common in the Chesapeake than in the North), see Helena M. Wall, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990), 86–120, esp. 98–102, 117–18. On seventeenth-century Chesapeake family demography, see Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, “‘Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law’: Parental Death in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on AngloAmerican Society and Politics, 153–82 (New York: Norton, 1979); Lorena S. Walsh, “‘Till Death Us Do Part’: Marriage and Family in SeventeenthCentury Maryland,” in Tate and Ammerman, eds, Chesapeake, 126–52; and Lois G. Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” wmq 3rd ser. 34 (1977): 542–71. I am grateful to John Murrin, whose conference commentary urged me to think about the impact of these changing demographic facts. Of course, this evidence does not preclude a possible relationship with a stepfather, but such a relationship would have had a different meaning relative to the transmission of paternal property. The father of James Madison, Jr (1751–1836) died in 1801; Patrick Henry’s (1736–99) father died in 1773; Thomas Nelson, Jr’s (1738–89) father died in 1772; Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), died in 1757; George Mason’s (1725–92) father drowned in 1735; Edmund Pendleton’s (1721– 1803) father died four months before his birth; George Washington’s (1732–99) father died when George was eleven; the father of Benjamin Harrison (1726?-91) died in 1745 when Harrison was a student at the College of William and Mary; Richard Henry Lee’s (1733–94) father died in November 1750; and Edmund Randolph’s (1753–1813) father and mother were loyalists who left Virginia for England in 1775. See Lance Banning, “James Madison,” in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds, American National Biography (hereafter anb), vol. 14, 305–6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999–2002), 306; Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 170; Emory G. Evans, “Thomas Nelson Jr,” in anb, vol. 16, 285–6; Merrill D. Peterson, “Thomas Jefferson,” in anb, vol. 11, 909–18 at 909; Brent Tarter, “George Mason,” in anb, vol. 14, 645–47 at 645;

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David Thomas Konig, “Edmund Pendleton,” in anb, vol. 17, 275–77 at 275; Forrest McDonald, “George Washington,” in anb, vol. 22, 758–66 at 758; Norman K. Risjord, “Benjamin Harrison” in anb, vol. 10, 197–8 at 197; J. Kent McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 24; and E. Lee Shepard, “Edmund Randolph,” in anb, vol. 18, 121–4 at 122. On Thomas Paine’s exploitation of the parental and imperial analogy, see Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution,” 190–225, esp. 213. See also Jordan, “Familial Politics,” 299–303. George Mason to the Committee of London Merchants, 6 June 1766, as quoted in Robert M. Weir, “Rebelliousness: Personality Development and the American Revolution in the Southern Colonies,” in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds, The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, 25–54 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 34. On this un-Lockean use of the analogy, see Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution,” 188–9. Brown, Good Wives, 322. Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 2, original emphasis; Carole Shammas, “AngloAmerican Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” wmq 3rd ser. 52 (1995): 104–44. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776, as quoted in Richard D. Brown, ed., Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution (Lexington, ma: D.C. Heath, 1992), 302. On the reluctance of American revolutionaries to restrain the powers of the household head in comparison with the French, see Shammas, A History, 65–6, 75–80. Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 112, 118. As Kenneth Lockridge argues from evidence in commonplace books, William Byrd II faced crushing rejections by several English ladies whom he attempted to marry, an experience that encouraged rage, and Thomas Jefferson’s angry outburst earlier in his life reflected frustration with his mother’s control of his late father’s resources; see Lockridge, On the Sources, 21–4, 47–72, 75, 86–90, 97; and Kenneth Lockridge, “Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederika J. Teute, eds, Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, 274–339 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). On women and marriage’s role in gentility and class formation, see Brown, Good Wives, 249–60, 267–72; and Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 37–40, 43, 69–101. Brown argues that after the 1680s Virginia courts supported “patriarchal transmissions of

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property” and were “less likely to grant widows and wives the de facto legal privileges they had enjoyed earlier in the century,” but other laws benefited women, including 1674 and 1738 laws requiring examinations to gain wives’ consent to the sale of dower property and widows’ rights to lifetime use of both slaves and land; see Good Wives, 287–91, esp. 287, and 334–42, esp. 335–6. On women’s property rights, see Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 14–40, 81–119; Linda L. Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41, 49–54 on dower rights, 70, 180–1; and John G. Kolp and Terri L. Snyder, “Women and the Political Culture of Eighteenth-Century Virginia: Gender, Property Law, and Voting Rights,” in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds, The Many Legalities of Early America, 272–92 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). As Kolp and Snyder argue, when a woman brought property to the marriage, her husband’s “curtesy interests in her land transformed coverture into a political tool” (292). I thank John Kolp for his suggestion. 20 Brown, Good Wives, 350–61, 364; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24–32; Parent, Foul Means, 4–5, 105–34, 159, 171–2, and on patriarchism and slavery, 220–35. See also James M. Baird, “Paternalism and Profits: Planters and Overseers in Piedmont Virginia, 1759–1825,” in Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds, Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, 147–68 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 273–96; Philip D. Morgan, “Three Planters and Their Slaves: Perspectives on Slavery in Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica, 1750–1790,” in Winthrop D. Jordan and Sheila L. Skemp, eds, Race and Family in the Colonial South, 37–79 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987); and Woody Holton, “‘Rebel against Rebel’: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter vmhb) 105 (1997): 158–93. Holton describes several rumours of slave conspiracies in the third week of April 1775 and the fear of many white Virginians that Dunmore had removed gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine deliberately so that patriot slaveholders would not be able to protect themselves in a slave uprising. Dunmore’s gunpowder decision, taking place within a context of heightened fears of slave revolt, and his later offer of freedom to slaves unified white Virginians in their opposition to British authority. 21 I thank Michael McDonnell for this point and for encouraging me to think about the non-elite perspectives on domestic harmony. Petitions by Loudoun rioters claimed that the demands on soldiers’ time could lead to poor

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men’s wives and children begging. Michael A. McDonnell and Woody Holton, “Patriot vs. Patriot: Social Conflict in Virginia and the Origins of the American Revolution,” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 231–56 at 240–1. For the traditional interpretation of Virginia as conservative and stable, see Charles S. Sydnor, American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (New York: Free Press, 1965, orig. publ. as Gentlemen Freeholders, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), esp. 19. But this interpretation echoes in Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts and New York, 14–76 (New York: Norton, 1976); Jack P. Greene, “‘Virtus et Libertas’: Political Culture, Social Change, and the Origins of the American Revolution in Virginia, 1763–1766,” in Crow and Tise, eds, Southern Experience, 55–108 at 59; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), bk 4; Rhys Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982; reprint, New York: Norton, 1988), chs 11 and 12, esp. 265–6; John G. Kolp, “The Dynamics of Electoral Competition in PreRevolutionary Virginia,” wmq 3rd ser. 49 (1992): 652–74; and John G. Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1–80. Jack P. Greene’s interpretation of the prerevolutionary Virginia gentry as a class based on the combination of values, roles, and actions is especially influential. Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776,” wmq 3rd ser. 33 (1976): 357–85, esp. 366. The April 1776 election for Virginia delegates to a new general convention witnessed the largest turnover in almost two decades, with a change of forty-eight seats (or 38%). Michael A. McDonnell, “Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 946–81 at 977–8. On gentry insecurity and fragility, see especially Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1967), 79; Greene, “Society, Ideology,” 76; Kenneth A. Lockridge, Settlement and Unsettlement in Early America: The Crisis of Political Legitimacy before the Revolution (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 60–94; and Brown, Good Wives, 365. Recent works have challenged the traditional notion of Virginia’s stability by explaining that the hegemony of the Virginia elite and popular willingness to follow them had definite limits. On the interaction of the gentry with ordinary Virginians, see especially Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

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Press, 1999); McDonnell, “Popular Mobilization,” 946–81; and Kolp, Gentlemen and Freeholders. Charles Sydnor, American Revolutionaries, 44–54; Greene, “Society, Ideology,” 26–30; Richard R. Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America,” wmq 3rd ser. 49 (1992): 401–30 at 407–9; and Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 33–5. The full Munford text appears in Jay B. Hubbell and Douglass Adair, eds, “Robert Munford’s The Candidates,” wmq 3rd ser. 5 (1948): 227–57. The Patriots was first published in 1798; the full text appears in Courtlandt Canby, ed., “Robert Munford’s The Patriots,” wmq 3rd ser. 6 (1949): 437– 503. Michael McDonnell, “A World Turned ‘Topsy Turvy’: Robert Munford, The Patriots, and the Crisis of the Revolution in Virginia,” wmq 3rd ser. 41 (2004): 235–70. I am grateful to Michael McDonnell for sharing an advanced copy of this excellent essay. On elite male authority being tested by “marriage, parenthood, slaveownership, and electoral politics,” see Brown, Good Wives, 319. Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 288, 290, 309. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 221–480; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in EighteenthCentury England (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975); Joan W. Scott, “Review Essay: The History of the Family as an Affective Unit,” Social History 4 (1979): 509–16; and Wall, Fierce Communion, 86–125, 128–31. For interpretations on the loss of parental authority in revolutionary America, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1980). On patriarchalism and manhood, see Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 5–29. For a discussion of the “dubious proposition that the decline of patriarchalism was universal,” see Weir, “Rebelliousness,” 25–32, quotation at 30. For

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different views on the timing of the decline of patriarchal absolutism, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 145–57, which points to the colonial era; Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness, xv-xvi, which claims that the decline happened in Virginia from the post-Revolution years to 1830; and Shammas, A History, 56, 83–107, which says that it both preceded the Revolution and gained momentum from it. On the exaggeration of patriarchalism in colonial America and the view that “patriarchal relations in the South actually may have strengthened in the eighteenth century,” see Wall, Fierce Communion, 132. On filial obedience, see Smith, Inside the Great House, 82–125; Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness, 28–39. On land inheritance and the Revolutionary elite, see Jackson T. Main, “The Distribution of Property in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1954): 241–58 at 241–9; J.R. Pole, “Representation and Authority in Virginia from Revolution to Reform,” Journal of Southern History 24 (1958): 16–51; and Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” wmq 3rd ser. 54 (1997): 307–46. On George Washington as a patriarchal symbol, see Cynthia S. Jordan, “‘Old Worlds’ in ‘New Circumstances’: Language and Leadership in PostRevolutionary America,” American Quarterly 40 (1988): 491–513; Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Simon P. Newman, “Principles or Men?: George Washington and the Political Culture of National Leadership, 1776–1801,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 477–507; and Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 197–267. On the connections between fatherhood and patriotism, see Kann, Republic of Men, 79–104. On developments (e.g., intestacy statutes) often cited as evidence that the Revolution transformed household relations, see Shammas, A History, 58–65. Many nineteenth-century American historians, in part due to the influence of Eugene Genovese, find paternalism a central ingredient in proslavery defences and in the character of the antebellum South. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, quoted in Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution,” 264. Nicholas Cresswell, The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 270. Jack P. Greene, ed., Diary of Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752–1778 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965), vol. 2, 736. Carter made this general comment more personal and autobiographical by writing two sentences afterward, “I am tortured with this species of filial disrespect.” For the view that both ideological and material interpretations have failed to explain the behaviours of leading patriots in Virginia, see Herbert Sloan

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and Peter Onuf, “Politics, Culture, and the Revolution in Virginia: A Review of Recent Work,” vmhb 91 (1983): 259–84 at 260–1, 264–5. Beeman, Varieties, 43–4; Isaac, Landon Carter’s, xvii, genealogical chart at xxiii. Jack P. Greene, “Introduction,” in Diary, vol. 1, 5; Isaac, Landon Carter’s, xviii. Carter’s daughter Susannah died in 1758. Beeman, Varieties, 48–9, 52–3, 65, compares voting patterns and distribution in 1735, 1755, and 1761 elections, as well as Carter’s performance in the latter two. Beeman argues that frequently male Virginians who did not meet the legal property qualification were permitted to vote, a situation that he interprets as evidence of political stability. Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 1008–9; Beeman, Varieties, 49. On a separate issue decades earlier, a neighbour had remarked that, in his view, Carter’s opinion would have “no weight with the People”; see Richard Parker to Richard Henry Lee, Lee Papers, dlar (hereafter Lee Papers), reel 1, 344–6. Elsewhere, Carter elaborated on his views against popularity, writing “I never courted Public applause … nothing renders a man more suspected than his schemes for Popularity,” and in 1775 he defined public esteem (in a manner that indicated his own sour grapes) as “a Species of love not really merited but a passion that enslaves the mind … because I am sensible that in my old Age no endeavour of mine has or does Attrackt [sic] it where even gratitude Should compel it”; see Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 1057, 923. On Carter’s self-construction in his diary and post-1766 changes, see Rhys Isaac, “Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Hoffman, Sobel, and Teute, eds, Through a Glass Darkly, 206–37 at 221. On Carter’s view of the monarch as father, see Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 173–4. [Landon Carter] (hereafter L.C.) to [Alexander] Purdie and [John] Dixon, 14 February 1774, Carter Papers, dlar (hereafter Carter Papers), reel 1, 759–65, quotation at 761; L.C. to [?], [?] April and May 1775, Carter Papers, reel 2, 13–15. Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 3–15, 265, 278, argues that Landon’s anger toward R.W. Carter intensified after 1766, and in 1776 at the height of anxiety about the rejection of monarchical patriarchalism, Landon was disturbed about a lack of obedience at home, including arguments with his eldest son and the running away of eight slaves. Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 849; Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness, 32–6; Isaac, “Stories,” 223. On harmonious relations between fathers and sons (and for the claim that contrary examples such as the Carters and the Nelsons are unusual), see Smith, Inside the Great House, esp. 100n43. Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 713–14. Ibid., vol. 2, 794–5. Ibid., vol. 1, 310; vol. 2, 702. For a full interpretation, see Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 179–81.

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53 Greene, Diary, vol. 1, 372–3. 54 “Reminiscences of John Page,” as quoted in Smith, Inside the Great House, 106. See also Lucille Griffith, ed., “English Education of Virginia Youth: Some Eighteenth-Century Ambler Family Letters,” vmhb 69 (1961): 7–27 at 14–16. 55 Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 765. 56 Ibid., vol. 2, 868–9. 57 Robert M. Calhoon, “‘Unhinging Former Intimacies’: Robert Beverley’s Perception of the Pre-Revolutionary Controversy, 1761–1775,” in Robert M. Calhoon, ed., The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, 94–106 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Robert M. Calhoon, ed., “‘A Sorrowful Spectator of These Tumultuous Times’: Robert Beverley Describes the Coming of the Revolution,” vmhb 73 (1965): 41–55 at 41–2; and letters of Robert Beverley to L.C., 1763–74, in vhs Mss1C2462a (hereafter Beverley Letters), esp. 7 October 1770, 9 June 1774, and 28 August 1774. 58 Robert Beverley to L.C., 24 September 1770, Beverley Letters. This is similar to the advice that Carter received from Judith Banks, who advised that an unhappy temper should not keep him from acting “as a tender Parent.” Banks asked that he excuse her impertinence in offering advice, but the remark is bold nonetheless; see Judith Banks to L.C., 22 March 1766, Carter Papers, reel 1, 442. 59 Greene, Diary, vol. 1, 185. 60 Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 181–4, quotation at 183. 61 In fleeting mentions of his married daughters later in the diary, Carter expresses loneliness and laments about the distance separating them. Lucy was able to visit approximately every month from Richmond County and Judith less frequently from Pittsylvania County (100 miles away); see Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 53. 62 Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 848–9, 983, 1003–4, 1019–20. 63 Elizabeth Wormeley Berkeley to L.C., 1 May 1765, Carter Papers, reel 1, 334. 64 Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 37–9, 52–4; Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 814–15, quotation at 814; and for Lucy, 965–7. 65 Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 939. 66 Ibid., 967. 67 Ibid., 814–15. 68 For examples of Carter’s complaints about lazy, deceitful, or careless overseers and slaves, see Greene, Diary, vol. 1, 138, 140, 199, 290–1, 301, 314, 369–70, 371–2, 377–8, 429–31, 450–1, 465–6; vol. 2, 588, 678–80. One poignant entry from 1773, vol. 2, 755, suggests Carter’s frustration with disobedience among his slaves: “I find it is almost impossible to make a negro do his work well. No orders can engage it, no encouragement persuade it, nor no Punishment oblige it.” On slavery’s impact on elite views of authority

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72

73

74 75

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77 78

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and power and for quotation from William Byrd II on the connection between patriarchalism and slavery, see Beeman, Varieties, 43. Greene, Diary, vol. 2, quotations at 976 and 907; see also 922–3. Ibid., vol. 2, 861. Albert H. Tillson, Jr, “Friendship and Commerce: The Conflict and Coexistence of Values on Virginia’s Northern Neck in the Revolutionary Era,” vmhb 111 (2003): 221–62. McGaughy, Richard, 18–20, Lee genealogical chart at 6; Philip C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 47–8; on Hannah, 44, 49. Philip Lee’s stubborn, authoritarian nature may be revealed by the chastisement that he received from the Westmoreland County Court for retaining an indentured servant beyond the legal limit, as well as by disagreements between Philip and his brothers. When Philip asked William to send minuets and songs and to include some magazines and newspapers, William did so, but he annoyed Philip by billing him for the reading material. When William claimed that it would not likely be possible to find a good carpenter and instead sent an unskilled worker, Philip complained that Richard Henry had “an excellent ship joiner and gardener from you,” and besides, the man whom William sent was an “immense eater”; see Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 74–6, quotation at 75. McGaughy, Richard, 24–6, claims that Richard Henry’s views on this broken engagement have not survived. Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 67–9, describes the case (the chancery suit was finally dismissed in 1764) and depicts Philip Lee as “being considered haughty, condescending, and even rude to persons of lesser station” (65). McGaughy, Richard, 56; Lee wrote in October 1772 about his desire to secure “[a] profitable employment … oppressed as I am with a numerous family. Five children already, another far advanced on the stocks, with a teaming little Wife, are circumstances sufficiently alarming”; see Richard Henry Lee (hereafter R.H.L.) to William Lee (hereafter W.L.), 23 October 1772, in James Curtis Ballagh, ed., Letters of Richard Henry Lee (1911, 1914; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), vol. 1, 78. Upon his marriage, Lee had described “Mrs. Pinchard [sic] … [as] a most tender attentive and fond mother to my dear little girls”; see Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 40. McGaughy, Richard, 57. Ibid., 114, 140; Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 98–9. Philip was survived in 1775 by his widow, daughters, and their short-lived infant son Philip II; Thomas Ludwell was survived in 1778 by widow Mary and their children, George (age 10) and Lucinda (age 7). Richard Henry Lee became the eldest living child with the death of his sister Hannah, although his brothers’ deaths had already made him the Lee family head.

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79 R.H.L. to W.L., 7 July 1770, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 52, 131. Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (1980; reprint, New York: Norton, 1990), 176, argues that Lee was trying to improve his finances, as council members were better paid. 80 R.H.L. to Patrick Henry, 26 May 1777, on tenants’ rents and family finances, Grigsby Papers, vhs Mss1G8782b5627; Holton, Forced Founders, 175–7, 183; Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 102–4; Joseph Blackwell to R.H.L., 16 January 1777, Lee Papers, reel 3, 31; R.H.L. to Thomas Jefferson, 3 May 1779, Lee Papers, reel 6, 113–14. 81 R.H.L. to John Page, 19 March 1776, quoted in McDonnell and Holton, “Patriot vs. Patriot,” 243; see also 237–44. 82 Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 81–2. Richard Henry Lee had dressed as a chaplain at this symbolic event, which saw the desecration of an effigy of George Mercer. Mercer, in turn, publicized the fact that Lee had campaigned for the position of stamp collector. 83 Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 203; Jack P. Greene “Character, Persona, and Authority: A Study of Alternative Styles of Political Leadership in Revolutionary Virginia,” in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict and Leadership: Essays in Honor of John Alden, 3–42 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 13. 84 I am grateful to Michael McDonnell for pointing this out to me. 85 Brown, Good Wives, 344–8; Jan Lewis, “Domestic Tranquility and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia,” wmq 3rd ser. 39 (1982): 139–44; Smith, Inside the Great House, 85–98. 86 R.H.L. to his sons Thomas and Ludwell Lee, 10 May 1777, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 287–8. 87 Arthur Lee (hereafter A.L.) to R.H.L., 20 March 1765, Lee Papers, reel 3, 326; A.L. to R.H.L., 10 September 1770, Lee Papers, reel 2, 33. Arthur wrote in 1770 that he had seen “so much mischief” from sending children to London to be educated that he could not recommend it for Richard Henry’s sons. Instead, he advised that they be taught law at home, learn from an able practitioner (but not in Williamsburg), and then perhaps spend two beneficial years in London. Although Arthur had been finding tutors for the children of family friends for some time, Richard Henry did not take his brother’s advice. 88 R.H.L. to W.L., 12 July 1772, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 70–2. Perhaps Richard Henry thought that £30 was a reasonable amount given that Arthur had written ten years earlier that such an amount could board a boy at school and that £50 would be “amply sufficient”; see A.L. to [R.H.L.], 28 June 1761, Lee Papers, reel 1. In 1773 Richard Henry repeated the maximum amount of £30 but said that he still hoped £28 would be adequate; see R.H.L. to W.L., 28 June 1773, Lee Papers, reel 1, 89–90. 89 A.L. to R.H.L., 23 September [1772], Lee Papers, reel 2, 115.

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90 W.L. to R.H.L., 24 December 1774, Lee Papers, reel 2, 268. 91 R.H.L. to [his sons, Thomas and Ludwell], 10 May 1777, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 287–8. 92 R.H.L. to George Wythe, 28 February 1783, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 2, 279. Richard Henry was writing to ask Wythe, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary, to instruct Ludwell. 93 R.H.L. to A.L., 30 June 1777, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 306. 94 R.H.L. to W.L., 25 January 1778, in ibid., vol. 1, 384. 95 R.H.L. to A.L., 11 February 1779, in ibid., vol. 2, 35. Richard Henry wrote that his family of seven children and another coming “suffers immensely by my absence.” Mrs Lee had accompanied him to Philadephia in 1776, and he wrote that he planned to “carry Mrs. Lee to Virginia that she may be indulged with the sight of her children, whom she longs to see after 6 months absence”; see R.H.L. to John Page, 19 February 1777, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 265. 96 W.L. to Masters Thomas and Ludwell Lee, 18 April 1775 and 29 May 1775, in William Lee Letterbook, 22 December 1774 to 24 August 1775, vhs Mss1L51f415; W.L. to R.H.L., 30 November 1777, and W.L. to Tom Lee, 14 December 1777, in William Lee Letterbook, 22 May 1777 to 24 June 1778, vhs Mss1L51f416 (hereafter W.L. Letterbook, 1777–78). Note that select letters by Willian Lee are published in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee, 1766–1783 (1891; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1968); since the above letters to his nephews are not included and since other letters are excerpts that prominently feature public affairs and omit family matters, I have used the original manuscript version at vhs. 97 W.L. to R.H.L., 1, 10 September 1777, and W.L. to R.H.L., 24 November 1777, W.L. Letterbook, 1777–78, 26–7 (original emphasis), 99–100. 98 Although Philip had not paid the patrimony of Arthur and William, he had still complained of Arthur’s move to “costly London”; see Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 71, 73. 99 Evidence of women judging and evaluating men on the basis of their dress, social deportment, and dancing skills can be found in [Lucinda Lee], Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia 1782 [1787], ed. Emily V. Mason (Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1871), 12, 37. 100 R.H.L. to A.L., 31 August 1780, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 2, 199. 101 A.L. to “Dear Brother” [Francis Lightfoot Lee?], 20 February 1777, Lee Papers, reel 3, 94. 102 A.L. to R.H.L., 19 March 1777, Lee Papers, reel 3, 132. On 4 October 1777 Arthur also reported to Richard Henry that Ludwell’s annual expenses on the whole were under £100 but that “his acquirements” greatly exceeded this figure. See also W.L. to R.H.L., 2 January 1778, Lee Papers, reel 4, 7; and W.L. to R.H.L., 15 October 1778, Lee Papers, reel 5, 404–5.

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103 A.L. to R.H.L., 20 May 1770, Lee Papers, reel 2, 22. Arthur reported that his study of law was going slowly but was pleasant; he had previously studied medicine but was not inclined to practise. See also R.H.L. to A.L., 12 May 1778, Lee Papers, reel 4, 563–5. 104 R.H.L. to A.L., 11 February 1779, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 2, 35. 105 R.H.L. to A.L., 19 May 1778, 6 September 1778, and 16 September 1778, in Ballagh, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 408, 435, 437. 106 W.L. to R.H.L., 14 October 1779, Lee Papers, reel 6, 409–10; and W.L. to R.H.L., 30 October 1779, Lee Papers, reel 6, 434–6. William wrote increasingly concerned letters to his brother Francis asking for news of Green Springs, an estate in Virginia that William’s wife had inherited from her father. By 1780 and 1782, William’s letters to Francis were frantic and his financial losses serious; see W.L. to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 21 March 1780, Lee Papers, reel 6, 609; and W.L. to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 13 February 1782, reel 7, 195. In the latter letter, William complained that he had not received a letter from Francis for four years and none about private business for over seven years. Richard Henry reported in 1781 that William had lost sixty-five slaves, forty-five of whom were valuable adults and artisans; see R.H.L. to George Washington, 17 September 1781, Lee Papers, reel 7, 148–51. 107 A.L. to R.H.L., 3 April 1780, Lee Papers, reel 6, 619–20; McGaughy, Richard, 221–2, 229–30. Ludwell resigned from this position when Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated. 108 The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that Richard Henry’s eldest son had written his father while he was in New York and before he knew his father’s views on the proposed Constitution; according to the newspaper, Thomas claimed that the only opponents that the Constitution had in Virginia were “fools and knaves.” The story was reprinted in January 1788 in Virginia. It is unclear whether it was accurate and, if so, whether there was a rift between family members; see McGaughy, Richard, 197–8, 202n35; and John P. Kaminski et al., eds, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison: State Historical Society, 1988), vol. 8, 284. The incident suggests that the public continued to believe that familial authority and public authority were intertwined or that a politician should be able to convince those closest to him, or those subordinate to him (a younger brother and a son), to share his opinions. 109 Oliver Perry Chitwood, Richard Henry Lee: Statesman of the Revolution (Morgantown, wv: West Virginia Foundation, 1976), 133. 110 R.H.L. to John Adams, 8 October 1779, quoted in Pauline Maier, “Early Revolutionary Leaders in the South and the Problem of Southern Distinctiveness,” in Crow and Tise, eds, Southern Experience, 3–24 at 14. Maier also discusses that Lee and other southerners “saw a deep enmity between slavery and freedom” (18–19).

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111 On Arthur Lee’s political activism, see John Sainsbury, “Arthur Lee of Virginia: The Forgotten Revolutionary,” in Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele, eds, The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, 203–20 (Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 2000); and Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 112 Earlier than the 1778 resolutions, which Richard Henry Lee supported, the Association adopted by the First Continental Congress had prohibited a number of luxurious gentlemanly pastimes, including gambling and horseracing; see Elizabeth Cometti, Social Life in Virginia during the War for Independence (Williamsburg: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1978), 10–24; T.H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia,” wmq 3rd ser. 34 (1977): 239–57; Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217–44. For Landon Carter’s denunciation of gambling and other vices of youth, see Greene, Diary, vol. 2, 640–1, 703, 780–1, 794–5, 868–9, 1013. 113 Emory G. Evans, “The Rise and Decline of the Virginia Aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernethy, 62–78 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 67–70; Emory G. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia,” wmq 3rd ser. 19 (1962): 511–33; Emory G. Evans, “Private Indebtedness and the Revolution in Virginia, 1776 to 1796,” wmq 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 349–74; Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison: Madison House, 1996), 43–68. 114 Isaac, Landon Carter’s, 181–4. 115 McGaughy, Richard, 172–3; Nagel, Lees of Virginia, 54–64. 116 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, quoted in Burrows and Wallace, “American Revolution,” 264–5, and discussed in Bruce Mazlish, “Leadership in the American Revolution: The Psychological Dimension,” in Leadership in the American Revolution, 113–33, Library of Congress Symposia on the American Revolution (Washington, dc: Library of Congress, 1974), 122–3. 117 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, 195.

16 “We Are No Less Friendly to Liberty Than They” British Antislavery Activists Respond to the Crisis in the American Colonies margaret m.r. kellow

In the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, events on one side of the ocean resonated with and influenced the experience of peoples thousands of miles away. As goods, people, and ideas crisscrossed the Atlantic, they constructed a coherent community despite the vast distances. This chapter looks at one dimension of that community and asks whether what was so obviously true for the colonial world also held true for the metropole. How did an event occurring in the hinterlands of empire affect the choices made and the options available to individuals and movements in Britain itself? For example, a fledgling antislavery movement had begun to take shape on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1760s. In this transatlantic community, earnest British reformers corresponded with, encouraged, and eagerly welcomed their American counterparts as increasing numbers of people in the mainland colonies and Britain itself began to question the morality of slavery. This promising beginning soon encountered very heavy weather as tensions between colonies and mother country intensified and then exploded into an American Revolution that completely disrupted the imperial tie. My question is this: what impact did the rupture have on the opponents of slavery in Britain? Writing in 1808, Thomas Clarkson included in his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade a diagram of the origins of abolitionism.1 Two great rivers, British and American antislavery, are depicted, each with dozens of tributaries bearing the names of events, groups, and individuals that contributed to the

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abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Although Clarkson’s illustration acknowledges the contributions of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, alongside those of American abolitionists Jonathan Woolman and Anthony Benezet, it conveys little sense of how the American Revolution and its aftermath affected the British campaign for abolition of the slave trade. Nevertheless, the fracturing of the Atlantic world, a world in no small measure constructed by the slave trade, had important consequences for the abolition movement.2 The discourse of the colonial crisis galvanized qualms and reservations about the probity of slaveholding and slave trading that antedated the controversy. American Quakers had begun questioning slavery in the late seventeenth century, and these concerns motivated increasing numbers of the Society of Friends to renounce slaveholding by the mid-eighteenth century.3 British Quakers joined with evangelical Christians in Britain and Ireland to raise questions about the slave trade and slavery itself.4 On both sides of the Atlantic, the political language of the Enlightenment focused attention on human freedom.5 In the mainland colonies Patriots articulated the Real Whig ideology that inspired them in a discourse that juxtaposed an ideal of “liberty” with the horrors of “tyranny” and “slavery,” inevitably calling the naturalness of slavery as an institution into question.6 In the imperial confrontation over the Stamp Act, synergies developed among these elements that would ultimately give rise to an abolition movement. Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet captured this dynamic when he asked, “how many of those who distinguish themselves as Advocates of Liberty remain insensible, to the treatment of thousands and tens of thousands of our fellow men, who … are at this very time kept in the most deplorable state of slavery.”7 As the conflict escalated, more and more Britons and Americans came to recognize the inconsistency between principles of freedom and individual rights and the institution of slavery. As the frictions between mother country and colonies came to a head, the persistence of slavery in each others’ domains became wellworn counters in the mutual recrimination that ensued. John Millar, a student and later a colleague of Adam Smith’s at the University of Glasgow, mused that: It affords a curious spectacle to observe that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the unalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right.8

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On the American side, early drafts of the Declaration of Independence accused George III of foisting slavery on unwilling Americans and of wag[ing] cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere … [and] now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them[.]9

Subsequently, a far-reaching debate on slavery unfolded, centring on issues at the ideological foundations of the Revolution and distilling ideas about individual liberty already germinating throughout the Atlantic community.10 Over the next quarter-century, opposition to slavery developed steadily, culminating in parliamentary and Congressional debates on abolition of the slave trade in the 1790s. Much attention has been given to the impact of the American Revolution on the course of antislavery in the United States. Numerous scholars have demonstrated that contradictions between ideology and practice forced some Americans to initiate measures first against the slave trade and then, in many northern states, against slavery itself.11 Consideration of the American Revolution’s impact on British abolition has been overshadowed to some extent by the dramatic British response to upheavals in France and St Domingue during the French Revolution. In the latter case, fears of Jacobinism precipitated a sharp reaction in Britain against all forms of change including abolition of the slave trade and emancipation. However, the American War of Independence fostered the growth of antislavery sentiment in Britain in significant ways. The crisis in Britain’s American colonies altered and shaped the course of abolition in the mother country by the decisions that it forced in terms of tactics, by dividing and marginalizing support for slavery, and by shifting the onus for reform to British rather than American shoulders through its impact on the English national selfimage and ultimately by means of the place that British abolitionists accorded the American Revolution in the teleology of antislavery.12 A discussion of the impact of the American Revolution on British antislavery poses some logistical problems. The American Revolution was not a single moment but a series of events. Each of these demanded reassessment by contemporaries, and each evoked an altered response. Metaphors of bondage and oppression figured prominently in the libertarian rhetoric that characterized the coming of the Revolution. That these aroused concerns about the actual experience of enslaved Africans has been well-documented.13 However, the outbreak

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of hostilities, perceived in many quarters as civil war, put this contradiction in a different light. The reality of separation recognized at Paris in 1783 changed these perspectives again, and as the reaction of the 1790s dissipated the early momentum of antislavery, British abolitionists had to come to terms with the accommodations to slavery in the United States Constitution. British abolitionists themselves did not constitute a homogeneous community.14 Rather, abolition functioned as an axis intersecting with various religious and political concerns in late-eighteenth-century Britain. The spectrum of abolition embraced religious views as disparate as those of Sir William Dolben and Richard Price, the former a fervent Anglican, strenuously opposed to Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the latter a Dissenting minister.15 In the political realm, commentators as antithetical as Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine both denounced slaveholding.16 Not surprisingly, then, the impact of the Revolution on British antislavery proved subtle and diffuse rather than monolithic while, at the same time, crucial to the mobilization of disparate opinions in the campaign to end the slave trade. Shortly after the outbreak of armed hostilities between Britain and her American colonies in 1775, a series of developments increased awareness of the problem of slavery among the British public. The reexport trade in slave-grown tobacco soon collapsed in Glasgow.17 Unemployed sailors from slave ships rioted. The cessation of the slave trade during the Revolutionary War disrupted the economy of the entire Liverpool area, as demand for African trade goods diminished and a prohibition against the export of weapons cut into the supply of lucrative items that could be bartered for slaves.18 As the conflict dragged on, large numbers of American slaves, freed by the British in the course of battle, gravitated to London. There they lived in great destitution, straining the charitable facilities of the city. Their plight moved Granville Sharp and others to turn their attention to the problem of slavery in the colonies.19 A heightened awareness of slavery emerged in the political sphere as well. From the Stamp Act crisis onward, the complaints of the colonists struck responsive chords among many English reformers, and interest in the problems inherent in the slave trade took root most firmly among those who sympathized with the American colonists. Although Dr Johnson might have scoffed at slaveholders who vaunted liberty, Granville Sharp saw the situation of the colonists as analogous to that of the black slaves in Britain, for whom he had struggled for almost a decade.20 Similarly, the political oppression that Americans complained of resonated with the resentment experienced by Protestant Dissenters in England. Men such as Richard Price drew from this a

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revulsion toward all tyranny, of which slaveholding embodied simply the extreme form. To these reformers, the Revolution presented the prospect of honest citizens guided only by reason and morality setting out to correct injustice, and these perceptions heartened them. Although the American Revolution did not originate the techniques of extra-parliamentary opposition and agitation, it did provide a spectacular example of their use and effectiveness. As the Americans had taken their cue from the early Wilkite protests, British reformers were quick to appreciate colonial methods of mobilizing public opinion and to apply them to their own concerns.21 Wilberforce and Sharp learned the art of organization for antislavery agitation from their experiences in Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association working for parliamentary reform in 1779.22 Moreover, the problems addressed by these movements were, in the view of these reformers, inherently related to the question of slavery. Sharp explained his involvement in the association: “My first motive for interfering in political reformation, was an earnest desire to promote peace with America; the two subjects being connected with each other, and both with that of tolerating slavery in America.”23 What Sharp did not say, but what was equally true, was that deflecting the liberatory discourse of the American Revolution into antislavery defused its seditious potential. The revolt in the American colonies inspired British abolitionists. A number of former colonies enacted measures against the slave trade as part of a strategy of nonimportation. British abolitionists, seeing what they interpreted as hopeful signs that the revolutionaries would swiftly eradicate slavery from the new republic, strove to match American efforts.24 Sharp organized resistance to thwart attempts in Parliament by the West Indian merchants to give encouragement to the slave trade.25 However, British antislavery advocates soon found that although the libertarian rhetoric of the new nation presented a potent weapon, it cut two ways. Given the impact of the Revolution on the imperial economy, pro-American sympathies were something of a liability.26 When rebellious Americans invoked the “higher law” doctrines to which Sharp had appealed in his campaign against slavery, abolition itself became suspect as a threat to security of property and the established order. The widespread use of the metaphor of enslavement in American political rhetoric underscored this identification of antislavery with radicalism. The support of English Quakers for abolitionism coupled with their pacifist stance on the war with the colonies made them particularly suspect.27 The strong Dissenting element among antislavery supporters tarred all abolitionists as Non-Conformists. Each of these considerations engendered by the American Revolution impressed on British abolitionists the need to work judiciously within the

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system in order to effect abolition while avoiding alliances with other reform groups.28 These precautions would enable British abolitionism to withstand some of the accusations of Jacobinism that opponents would hurl at them after 1792. Aware of these constraints, Sharp argued that nothing could be done to eradicate slavery in the colonies until peace was restored, so he and others worked quietly, but diligently, for reconciliation.29 Reconciliation, however, was no longer possible. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, and the Treaty of Paris recognized the reality of American independence in 1783. Adjusting quickly to this reality, Quakers and others opposed to slavery, who had struggled to keep antislavery channels of communication open during the War of Independence, now looked forward to a successful joint effort in peacetime. Moreover, wartime developments in American antislavery gave rise to considerable optimism in Britain. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia had all extended the provision of the Non-Importation agreement, which banned the slave trade. Pennsylvania had begun a plan for gradual emancipation, and the skill and valour with which black troops had acquitted themselves on both sides of the conflict held the promise of large numbers of manumissions.30 In addition to these positive developments, foreign competition and interruptions in supplies of both slaves and foodstuffs during the hostilities revealed a weak point through which a wedge might be driven to divide West Indian planters from the slave traders in order to facilitate an attack on the slave trade.31 Perhaps the most encouraging consequence of the peace was the sense that the loss of Britain’s former colonies had not resulted in irreparable damage to the fabric of the nation. “A great kingdom is not easily ruined,” wrote Rev. James Ramsay in 1789. “Regulations in commerce, which have humanity and justice in view, will never bring a state into danger. Britain has exhibited new vigor since her force has lately been more concentered [sic].”32 This being so, other major changes in the institutional life of the British empire, such as abolition, might now be contemplated. If the American Revolution generated optimism among British antislavery forces, it also changed the parameters of the debate. “As long as America was our own,” wrote Thomas Clarkson, “there was no chance that a [cabinet] minister would have attended to the groans of the sons and daughters of Africa, however he might have felt for their distress … [Now] a prospect has been presented to our view, which shews it to be policy to remove their pain.”33 American independence diminished the proslavery lobby in Parliament.34 More important, a subtle process of creolization, a process by which slavery and planter

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culture came increasingly to be perceived as not English, began to accelerate.35 Slaveholding now became identified not with fellow Englishmen but with a distant and easily identified minority. Once divorced from their “yeomen” American counterparts, West Indian planters could be singled out for attack as decadent nouveau riches.36 With the American colonies removed from the British political context, West Indian slavery became increasingly exposed and vulnerable. At the same time, the memory of the Revolution sharply limited the measures that could be taken against slavery in the West Indies. Even those legislators most sympathetic to the enslaved recognized that the sugar islands comprised Britain’s wealthiest colonies. A direct attack on slavery had the potential to be the “Intolerable Act” for the West Indies, a spark that might ignite a Caribbean revolution.37 France could be depended upon to exploit such a situation just as she had done with America in 1778. The possibility that the West Indian men might follow the American example was probably more apparent than real. However, in their dealings with the West Indian planters, British abolitionists and later Parliament itself displayed a measure of prudence toward the potentially disaffected colonists that was undoubtedly a legacy of the American Revolution.38 Thus, when a group of Quakers and other London antislavery reformers moved to organize their activities in 1787, they decided, over the objections of Granville Sharp, to focus their endeavours on “Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade” rather than on general emancipation.39 This approach avoided the dangers of a direct attack on property rights, the issue that had triggered such strong reactions among the Americans. Using this strategy, abolitionists hoped to reassure the planters and avoid alienating conservative interests in Britain. Over the next twenty years, abolitionists would argue forcefully that the continuation of the slave trade was not essential to the survival of plantation agriculture or, for that matter, to the survival of slavery itself.40 By focusing on the slave trade, British abolitionists skilfully employed the principle of divide and conquer to exploit increasing antipathies between planters and slave traders. West Indian planters had little reason to protect the interests of the English merchants who held their notes and supplied not only them, but also their competitors, with slaves.41 When abolitionists exposed the appalling conditions on slave ships, it required only a modicum of hypocrisy for even a West Indian planter to deplore the cruelties of the Middle Passage. Such posturing reduced support for the proslave-trade interest in Parliament by a few more votes.42 The Abolition Society was quick to point out that slavery had survived interruptions in the trade during the Revolution. The American example also suggested that with better treatment, the

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slave population could reproduce itself and even increase. By these means, the abolitionists argued, planters might free themselves from dependence on the slave traders.43 By separating the interests of planters from those of slave traders, these arguments created an entry for the thin end of the wedge of parliamentary regulation. In 1788 William Pitt forced Sir William Dolben’s Act through both Houses of Parliament, an Act that regulated the number of slaves who could be carried on a ship (in accordance with a ratio based on tonnage) and that granted a bounty to the captain and surgeon of a vessel for live slaves landed.44 By this Act, Parliament asserted its right to legislate the terms of enslavement. The American Revolution influenced the decision to attack the slave trade first in another way. Abolition was now the only means by which British antislavery forces could exert any influence on the fate of slavery in the United States. Ideally, they hoped to mobilize American antislavery sentiment for joint action against the trade, but at the very least, they recognized that British slave traders supplied large numbers of slaves to the former colonies.45 Although some abolitionists merely sought to end British complicity, others recognized that unilateral British withdrawal from the trade simply left the field open for her competitors. Thus they concentrated their efforts on pressing for an international ban.46 Although limited in terms of its impact on slavery as a whole, this objective had global implications, for Britain alone had the naval power to impose and enforce a ban on slave trading. In the light of these hopes, it is not surprizing that the momentum generated in Britain by optimistic assessments of the progress of antislavery in the new United States faltered somewhat when the Americans resumed the slave trade in 1783. Spurred by westward expansion and the need to replace wartime losses, American participation in the trade soon exceeded prewar levels.47 British antislavery advocates who had sympathized with the former colonists during the Revolution urged Americans to intensify their commitment to liberty. British abolitionist David Cooper urged Americans not to be like the wicked servant of the Bible, who although forgiven the debts that he owed his master, extorted full payment from those indebted to him. Cooper enumerated the grievances cited in the Declaration of Independence and pointed out that enslavement involved far greater deprivation and oppression. He advised the Americans that if they wished to be taken at their word, they must extend their ideology of liberty to the blacks in their midst. He begged them not to let self-interest blind them on this vital question.48 As it became clear that slavery would persist in the new nation, previously optimistic commentators such as Richard Price became more

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guarded: “I am happy to find that the United States are entering into measures for discountenancing it [i.e., the slave trade], and for abolishing the odious slavery which it has introduced,” wrote Price in 1788. “Till they have done this, it will not appear they deserve the liberty for which they have been contending … Nothing can excuse the United States if it is not done with as much speed and at the same time with as much effect as the particular circumstances and situation will allow.”49 Granville Sharp doubted the ability of nations tainted by slavery to endure and sounded an ominous note by suggesting that the former colonies would not escape divine retribution if they failed to do justice to the slave.50 The formation of the London Abolition Committee occurred simultaneously with the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and in the full expectation that American antislavery forces were about to make major advances. Repeatedly, British abolitionists exhorted their American counterparts to follow the example of the Somerset case and pronounce slavery incompatible with American freedom.51 These hopes were disappointed by provisions in the Constitution that affirmed the property rights of slaveholders and safeguarded the slave trade until 1808, but initially the provisions provoked surprisingly little direct response from the abolitionist community in Britain. Richard Price, pleased that the new Constitution incorporated so many of the political and fiscal ideas expressed in his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, applauded the document as evidence that men could amend their institutions and that further reform was possible. Others, troubled by the continuation of slavery in the former colonies, responded less sanguinely and in a manner suggesting their belief that the initiative in antislavery had now passed to British hands.52 In the wake of these developments, the Somerset decision, originally rendered in 1772, gained new relevance after 1787, further accentuating the impact of the American Revolution. Increasingly, the persistence of slavery in the United States disillusioned British abolitionists about the potential of the new nation. “[N]othing,” scolded Liverpool abolitionist Edward Rushton, “can look more ridiculous than to see an assertor [sic] of American liberties with his Constitution in one hand and his negro lash in the other.”53 British readings of Somerset enabled abolitionists to reassess their thinking about British society and to conclude that the potential for regeneration existed there. In turn, this permitted British abolitionists to redirect their efforts with renewed optimism while at the same time assessing what they perceived as the American failure to be an overwhelming setback to antislavery in the new nation. Together with the Treaty of Paris, which formally recognized the independence of the former colonies, popular interpretations

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of the Somerset decision seemed to free British abolitionists from the sense of personal complicity in slavery that would later envenom and divide American antislavery. Similarly, following ratification of the American Constitution, British opponents of slavery could take pride in the fact that although slavery was supported by positive law in the United States, in Britain it was not. British abolitionist interest in West Indian slavery soon displayed new intensity. “To the American states,” Robert Nickolls argued in a 1787 letter to the treasurer of the Abolition Society, the abolition of the British trade “would afford a proof that we are no less friendly to liberty than they.”54 Britain now had the opportunity to initiate “a new and important era … [N]o human government (if we except what little has been done in this head in America) has ever yet authoritatively declared by a public act” that slaveholding was ultra vires.55 By the same token, this apparent failure, with the exception of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts (where in any case there had been relatively few slaves), to achieve even gradual emancipation in the American states gave evidence of the strength of proslavery lobbies there. These perceptions of the American experience convinced British antislavery advocates that slaveholders would not willingly surrender their privileges. Abolition or even ameliorative legislation would have to be imposed. Slaveholding interests ran too deep for voluntary remedies to be effective.56 For this reason perceptions of an American failure had the effect of strengthening the reformers’ commitment to the imperial tie since British abolitionists realized that left to themselves, West Indian planters would do nothing to liberate enslaved Africans. Once again, the Somerset decision came into play as antislavery activists such as Sharp argued that through the imperial connection, the implications of the decision as he understood them could be extended to the colonial legislatures to eradicate slavery in the remaining British possessions. By 1795 Sharp was attacking the danger “of tolerating slavery in any part of the British dominions, contrary to constitutional principles of a legal English government.”57 The ostensible American failure had the effect of moving British abolitionists from exhortation to legislative coercion as a means to accomplish their goal. The absence of antislavery measures in the United States Constitution, coupled with the renewed emphasis on the imperial tie, also inclined British abolitionists to use economic arguments to attack the slave trade.58 Historian Seymour Drescher has drawn attention to the theoretical inconsistencies in the economic arguments mounted by British abolitionists in the period during and after the American Revolution.59 Although The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, laissezfaire did not immediately displace mercantilism. Ambivalence on this

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subject shaped discourse on the American crisis as Britons pondered the extent to which their economic wellbeing depended on the retention of the colonies. This same ambivalence carried over to arguments used by the antislavery advocates. Abolitionists countered mercantilist insistence that Britain must regain control of the slave trade with arguments to prove that abolition would redress a situation in which Britain could no longer monopolize the supply of slaves to her own and other colonies. Therefore, they argued, she should endeavour to prohibit the trade entirely.60 On the other hand, proslavery arguments based on laissez-faire were rebutted with evidence to show that with suitable incentives, blacks could be made to labour on the plantations voluntarily.61 Although prepared to use any argument that would serve, British abolitionists tended increasingly toward laissez-faire and, in particular, free labour. As Wilberforce pointed out in a speech to Parliament in May 1789, despite the dire predictions of West Indian merchants in 1774, Britain had survived and even prospered following the loss of the American colonies. Abolition, he argued, would be no more traumatic: “Here you can do good by wholesale, and at no expense; you may enrich others and be yourselves no poorer.”62 This thinking underwrote the London Abolition Committee’s decision to found a free labour colony in Sierra Leone, as the alleged American failure to grasp the opportunity for emancipation began to feed a new spirit of initiative in British antislavery. In Sierra Leone destitute blacks from Britain would be given the opportunity to labour in a free market situation.63 The colony would set an example to both the West Indies and the United States. By planting in Africa, British abolitionists argued, the mercantilist relationship of hinterland and metropolis could be made to function without the stresses that had arisen with the North American colonies. Thomas Cooper’s letter to Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle demonstrates the interplay of these ideas: But granting that the West Indies could not be cultivated without slaves, which is very far from being the case; yet the nation would become considerably the gainers, by attending to the colonization of Africa rather than the West Indies, which will certainly at one time or other involve us in another American war.

Cooper explained that The use of a colony is to supply the Mother Country with those commodities which the latter is in want of and cannot produce, at a cheaper rate, and in greater perfection than the Mother Country can be supplied with from any other place: and secondly, to take off those commodities in exchange, which the colony cannot produce and which the Mother Country has to spare.

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“For this purpose,” Cooper continued, “the first consideration ought to be, to colonize in an opposite climate: the effect of colonizing in a similar climate we found, by the most imprudent and absurd encouragement which we afforded to the North American colonies.”64 Clarkson argued that the trade in cotton, woods, and dyestuffs with an African colony would make up “for the treasures expended in the loss of America.” Because of defaulting debtors, “[o]ur trade with America since the late peace, has been rather a detriment than a gain … From Africa, we might derive the same articles but in greater perfection, and with no risk.”65 In Clarkson’s estimate, the slave trade obstructed the highly profitable trade that might be conducted in African goods if Africans and freed slaves were permitted to labour in a free market situation. The American Revolution shaped the course of British antislavery by giving substance to abstract principles and by mobilizing and channelling latent antislavery support. It provided opportunities and exposed weaknesses through which slavery could be attacked. However, it also demonstrated that if the campaign was to avoid alienating and antagonizing crucial interest groups, British abolitionists would have to proceed with prudence and restraint. The conflict with Britain’s American colonies also influenced the course of British antislavery through its impact on the mother country’s self-image. The loss of the North American colonies had been a bitter pill for a nation still flush with the conquests of the Seven Years’ War.66 Colonial invective regarding British tyranny wounded the sensibilities of a nation whose inhabitants prided themselves on being the freest of men, not least because colonial accusations touched nerves already sensitized by the Wilkite protests.67 Each side had abused the other for slaveholding before the fighting began. After the Revolution, antislavery advocates on both sides of the Atlantic urged the eradication of slavery from their own territories in order to vindicate themselves. Noting the subtle competition between British and American antislavery that resulted from these attempts, David Brion Davis has argued that abolition served a “hegemonic function” in British society, legitimating at minimal cost the emerging middle class and the bourgeois values that they represented and thereby deflecting criticism from social problems engendered by the Industrial Revolution. One might argue equally, however, that abolition played a key role in refurbishing the British self-image following the American Revolution. Part of this process involved an affirmation of the government that the colonists had repudiated, a legitimation fostered by the contrast between the proslavery compromises in the American Constitution and popular understandings of the Somerset decision.68 It is significant in this context that, unlike other reforms advocated in this period, support for

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abolition was widespread in Britain and evoked very little organized resistance, especially after 1787. Antislavery lecturers could get a hearing when advocates of Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic emancipation, or parliamentary reform were denied access to halls and platforms.69 Moreover, by the late 1780s, this support went far beyond Protestant Dissenters and included a strong secular component. The persistence of slavery in the United States and the growing support for abolitionism in Britain gave the initiative in antislavery to the British. The putative American failure on the one hand and British enterprise on the other went far to restore England’s national selfesteem.70 It also helped to stabilize identity boundaries between Britons and their former colonists, which as Dror Wahrman has pointed out, had been badly undermined by the Revolutionary experience.71 Robert Nickolls outlined the benefits that would accrue if Britain should enact abolition: “To all the world it will prove our equity and humanity, and produce a confidence in the national virtue, which could be felt in peace and in war, in our funds, our commerce, our treaties … To nations yet unborn it will transmit liberty and happiness. To the reign of George the Third it will give peculiar lustre, and exhibit him as the friend of mankind at large, whom the noblest in support of piety and morals at home distinguishes as the real father of his people!”72 Now that Americans had chosen to embrace slavery, Britons had an opportunity to reject it. The War of Independence had challenged the moral legitimacy of the British government, but by the early 1790s slavery was entrenched in the American Constitution and reaffirmed by a fugitive slave law in 1793. By contrast, in Britain slavery was not legal, and an abolition measure (Sir William Dolben’s Act) had passed the House of Commons in 1788. The American Revolution accelerated a “creolization” of slaveholding, a perception that slavery obtained only in exotic and distant locales. The Somerset decision had done much to foster this notion, which also contributed to the restoration of national self-esteem. In a revealing juxtaposition, Clarkson referred to slavery as “the colonial tyranny” in 1795.73 When slavery persisted in the United States, it became a matter of pride to intensify efforts to eradicate it from the remaining British possessions. At the same time, this creolization and the vindication of English liberty permitted radical critics of the existing political order to renew their efforts to effect change. The proslavery compromises in the United States Constitution compelled these radicals, who had envisioned the new nation as the embodiment of their social and political aspirations, to reassess their estimates of the potential for reform and political freedom in Britain itself. Given the religious and secular millennialism of the late eighteenth century, reformers of every stripe readily saw contemporary events in

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chiliastic terms.74 Just as American commentators imagined their revolution as the dawning of a new age of liberty, British abolitionists expected the American Revolution to fill a crucial place in the teleology of abolition. Seen in this light, failure to respond to the imperatives of the age took on ominous implications. In his Thoughts on Slavery (1774), John Wesley had warned that retribution would be inevitable if men persisted in the sin of slaveholding.75 The civil strife of the Revolution seemed like God’s judgment on a guilty nation.76 Numerous preachers, including Richard Price, called for repentance and reconciliation, reminding their listeners that the Lord had not destroyed the city in which ten just men had been found.77 When the colonists had appeared to be taking steps to liberate their slaves, antislavery sympathizers in Britain were reluctant to condemn them. With these concerns in mind, Quakers in particular struggled to keep open antislavery channels of communication as a means of bridging the rupture. Nourished by a strong sense of Britain’s special place in the Divine Plan and by secular as well as theological millennialism, British antislavery supporters initially perceived the Revolution as the working of Providence. Defeat revealed (and resulted from) Britain’s moral decay. The American victory came as a consequence of the new nation’s vigour and purity.78 Through the conflict, slavery would be eradicated and the British polity reformed. “The great Revolution which has taken place in the western world may probably conduce (and who knows but that it was designed?) to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny,” speculated William Paley in 1785. “[N]ow that this contest and the passions which attend it, are no more, there may succeed perhaps a season for reflecting, whether a legislature which had so long lent its assistance to the support of an institution replete with human misery, was fit to be trusted with an empire the most extensive that ever obtained in any age or quarter of the world.”79 The anticipated progress of antislavery in the United States fostered this millennialism. For Granville Sharp, emancipation would signal the advent of the millennium. When men lived and ruled by God’s law, they would recognize the iniquity of slavery. In a statement identifying the interests that Sharp saw as obstructing emancipation, he predicted that slavery would be abolished when “our deluded statesmen, lawyers, commercial politicians, and planters … understand” the legal impossibility of slavery.80 This millennialism also had a strong secular component. The American Revolution galvanized developing eighteenth-century concepts of human freedom, revealing the essential nature of slavery in a new light and resonating with the strong tradition of the rights of Englishmen, which the Glorious Revolution had purportedly secured. The whole process became part of a vision of the progress of mankind that was

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particularly shared by many Dissenters.81 At the beginning of the Revolution, the focus of millennial expectations about English liberty had been located in America. Initially, enslavement functioned primarily as a metaphor for political tyranny, but eventually almost all of the British radicals came to see the American Revolution as inherently bound up with the actuality of enslavement. However, as the provisions of the United States Constitution became known, antislavery activists in Britain realized that, although determined to free themselves, the former colonists had at best an uncertain will to free their bondsmen. As a consequence, the persistence of slavery in the new republic undermined British reformers’ confidence in the prospects of the United States.82 “America’s body is sound,” declared David Cooper, “we now await the actions of Congress to ascertain that her mind is as well.”83 That “which had revived the hopes of good men and promised an opening to better times, will become a discouragement to all future efforts in favor of liberty, and prove only an opening to a new scene of human degeneracy and misery,” warned Richard Price.84 Slavery was the weed in the garden that threatened to destroy the Americans’ hard-won liberty and with it the expectations of political reformers in Britain. Although Price and Wilberforce took an optimistic view of the United States Constitution, seeing it as a beginning and recognizing the constraints under which it had been formulated,85 Granville Sharp came to a different conclusion: “[T]he glorious American Revolution, which gave to people of one complexion independence and liberty, unhappily left those of another to groan under the weight of the most cruel and remorseless slavery.”86 This being so, British reformers concluded that liberty, like charity, would have to begin at home. In the teleology of abolition, the long shadow of the Somerset decision intersected with reaction to this perceived failure of American antislavery to reinvigorate the British effort. Dark predictions about the future of the United States reflected more than mere chauvinism. In the years after the Treaty of Paris, the Revolutionary War came to be seen as a chastening for Britain rather than as a judgment. Thirteen colonies had been lost, but many more had been retained globally. In July 1784 British sermons for a national day of thanksgiving declared that the ten just men had been found.87 The Somerset decision and growing support for antislavery testified to reformation in Britain. The blossoming of British antislavery manifested what the end of the war had heralded: that Britain’s special place in the Divine Plan remained secure. The American Revolution catalyzed British antislavery, fusing the concept of liberty, which had emerged from the deliberations of eighteenthcentury political philosophers, with the problem of slavery. Because the bondage of African slaves resonated with contemporary political issues,

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political activists in Britain incorporated it into their rhetoric. By providing an example of abstract principles in action, the American Revolution invigorated British antislavery and other reform movements. Perhaps because the discourse of the Revolutionary era had made such lavish use of the metaphor of enslavement, antislavery supporters were able to capitalize on this heightened awareness with greater success than did proponents of Repeal and parliamentary reform. At several points, the American Revolution determined the tactics of British antislavery. Although, during the war, judicious cooperation between British and American antislavery advocates had been undertaken, following the inclusion of proslavery compromises in the United States Constitution, the initiative in antislavery was deemed to have passed to Britain. The disruption of the slave trade during the Revolutionary War effectively undermined assertions that the trade was essential to the wellbeing of British commerce. Abolitionists were not slow to exploit this development, but with the lessons of the Revolution in mind, they refrained from confronting West Indian planters directly. Instead, they elected to attack the institution of slavery at its weakest point: the slave trade. Using economic and political arguments, British antislavery attempted to set an example for the Americans with the establishment of a free-labour colony for ex-slaves in Sierra Leone. Lastly, as the momentum of British antislavery increased, particularly in contrast to the perceived failure of American antislavery after 1787, British abolitionists came increasingly to view the slave trade in global terms and to realize that British withdrawal from the slave trade would be feasible only as part of an international ban – a ban that Britain alone could police. The American Revolution had a significant impact on British national identity. By challenging prevailing notions of British liberties, the imperial crisis mandated a response that antislavery, as a consequence of the rhetoric of the Revolutionary era, was particularly suited to supply. The humanitarian impulse expressed in antislavery activity functioned to affirm emergent capitalist values.88 In similar fashion, the antislavery hopes raised by the Revolution and then dashed by the proslavery compromises of the United States Constitution, when taken in conjunction with popular understandings of the Somerset decision, served to legitimate the essence if not the shape of the British polity.89 The War of Independence also had implications for the ways that Britons viewed the millennial dimensions of abolitionism. Once they became convinced of the injustice of their own practice of slavery, British antislavery activists feared that the enormity of the evil must call down some form of retribution. The reversal of British fortunes in the American colonies fulfilled this apprehension. However, once the

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chastisement had been inflicted, Britain, now humbled, could regenerate and reform. The perceived failure of American abolition, coupled with the British advances in antislavery, seemed to confirm a sense of the British nation as once more “elect.” By the same token, progress toward abolition gave confidence that other social ills could and would be addressed and remedied, and thus the American Revolution proved a good fit with the eventual teleology of abolition. The Revolution had fractured the community of the British Atlantic, but by closing off some options, dictating some choices, and opening up new opportunities, it materially advanced the progress of emancipation in the British Empire.

notes 1 See Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by the British Parliament, abridged by Evan Lewis (Wilmington, de: R. Porter, 1816), facing 259. 2 For a discussion of the complexities implicit in Clarkson’s diagram, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–6. 3 See Jean Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985). 4 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (hereafter Slavery in Western Culture) (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1966), 291–390; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770–1832 (hereafter Age of Revolution) (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1975), 213–54; and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 136–41. 5 See Davis, Slavery in Western Culture, 391–445. 6 The classic statements of this argument can be found in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992), 232–46; and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 363–87. See also F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 37, no. 1 (1980): 3–28. 7 Anthony Benezet, A Caution to Great Britain and Her Colonies (Philadelphia, 1766), 2. 8 John Millar (1735–1801), Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), http://www.ecn.bris.ac.uk/het/millar/rank. See also Samuel Johnson, “Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress” (London, 1775), for his famous query about why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (89).

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9 As quoted in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: How America Declared Its Independence from Britain (London: Pimlico Books, 1999), 120. See also James Walvin’s succinct summary of these tensions in Walvin, “Freedom and Slavery and the Shaping of Victorian Britain,” Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 1 (1994): 246–59 at 249. 10 Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 97ff. 11 See, for example, Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 11–14; and Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 109–38. 12 This last was particularly true of English Evangelicals, of whom William Wilberforce, for forty years the champion of British antislavery, has been called “The Moses of the Israelites”; see Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 69–78, quotation at 45. 13 See Bailyn, Ideological, 232–46. On the American Revolution as a civil war, see Dror Wahrman, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1239–40. 14 For the sake of clarity, it should be noted that abolition in the British context referred to the campaign to end the slave trade, whereas the efforts to eradicate slavery are described as antislavery. This is the opposite of the connotations that these terms have come to possess in the American context. Reference will be made later to the question of whether British abolition was in fact a goal in itself or a tactic in the long-term pursuit of emancipation. 15 The Test and Corporation Acts imposed political disabilities on those who did not conform to the Anglican communion. By these acts, Dissenters such as Price (and also Roman Catholics) were barred from office holding and the universities. 16 Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 60–1. 17 The initial impact on trade in Glasgow was offset to some degree by the foresight of Scottish traders who stockpiled tobacco in anticipation of the suspension of trade with the Chesapeake, but the reexport trade never recovered; see M.L. Robertson, “Scottish Commerce and the American War of Independence,” Economic History Review 9, no. 1 (1956): 123–31. 18 The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 4 September 1775, as quoted in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, dc: Carnegie Institution, 1930–34) vol. 2, 548–9. 19 Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. (London: Henry Colburn and Co., 1820), 259–60, 263. See also James Walvin, “The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832,” in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds, Antislavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey

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(Folkestone, uk: Dawson, 1980), 149–62; and Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760– 1848 (Brighton, uk: Harvester Press, 1982), 34. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, il: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 25. American Tories made the same argument; see Zilversmit, First Emancipation, 97. Following his arrest for publishing a paper, The North Briton, highly critical of the Peace of Paris (1763) and disrespectful to George III, Member of Parliament John Wilkes fled to France. When he returned in 1768 and was reelected, the House of Commons repeatedly refused to seat him. Wilkes’s experiences sparked rioting in his London constituency under the banner of “Wilkes and Liberty” in support of freedom of the press and democratic reforms; see John Brewer, Party Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 163–200, 215–16. See also Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organization, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1963), 28; and James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England (Macon, ga: Mercer University Press, 1986). Rev. Christopher Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association worked for parliamentary reform by means of corresponding committees and circular letters; see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715– 1785 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 262–3. See also Black, Association, 124; Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (London: Longman, 2000), 155–70; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 242; and Davis, Age of Revolution, 363, 374. Hoare, Memoirs, 191. See, for example, Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African … (London: James Phillips, 1786), vii; and extract of a letter from Dr Fothergill to Granville Sharp, 11 March 1779, quoted in Hoare, Memoirs, 188. Hoare, Memoirs, 182–90. See Selwyn H.H. Carrington, “The American Revolution and the British West Indies Economy,” in Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 145. Davis, Age of Revolution, 222. Ibid., 404. See also Gordon K. Lewis, Slavery, Imperialism and Freedom: Studies in English Radical Thought (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 39. Hoare, Memoirs, 191. Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 29. Davis, Age of Revolution, 407. Rev. James Ramsay, An Address, to the Publick on the Proposed Bill for the Abolition of Slave Trade (London: James Phillips, 1789), 11, 37–8. See also Thomas

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35

36

37

38

39 40

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Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade, First Published in Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle (Manchester: C. Wheeler, 1787), 32. Thomas Clarkson, Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1788), 30. Royle and Walvin, English Radicals, 34; David Brion Davis, “Antislavery and the American Revolution,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 262–80 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 272–3. For a description of the numerical strength of the West Indian supporters in Parliament, see David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 53. Clarkson, Essay on the Slavery, ix. In addition, Davis, Age of Revolution, 454, has argued that in the climate of unrest that characterized British politics in this era, the slaveholding colonies could be perceived as insidious influences on British liberty. See also Wilson, Sense of the People, 274–5. The repeated protestations of their Englishness made by West Indian planters suggests a growing sense that slaveholding colonists were somehow different from Englishmen residing in Britain; see Jack P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 1 (2000): 1–31. Likewise, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India, which dominated parliamentary politics during the 1780s, also underscored this perception. Accused of exploiting Indians for his own profit, Hastings was eventually acquitted, but the proceedings ruined him; see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1986), 66. See, for example, the testimony of planter James Baillie of St Vincent before the House of Commons in 1790, published in Abridgement of the Minutes of the Evidence, taken before a Committee of the Whole House … to consider the Slave Trade (hereafter Evidence to Consider the Slave Trade) (London: 1790; reprint, Chicago: Afro-American Press, 1969), 78. See also Davis, Age of Revolution, 406; Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 178; and Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 25. See, for example, Roger Anstey’s discussion of the views of Sir Henry Dundas regarding the 1796 Abolition Bill in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 308. But see also Seymour Drescher, “Abolitionist Expectations: Britain,” in Howard Temperley, ed., After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents, 41–66 (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 46. Drescher argues that this hesitancy was a consequence of abolitionist ambivalence about the economic aspects of free labour. Davis, Age of Revolution, 406. See, for example, Robert Nickolls, Letter to the Treasurer of the Society Instituted for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London: James Phillips, 1788), 13. Davis, Age of Revolution, 407.

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42 See, for example, the deliberations of Lord Hawksbury as outlined in Dale H. Porter, The Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, 1784–1807 (Hamden, ct: Archon Books, 1970), 42–4. 43 See, for example, the testimony of Capt. Wilson, in Evidence to Consider the Slave Trade, vol. 3, 5; George Baillie, merchant and planter, in ibid., vol. 3, 73–80; and Dr Harrison, in ibid., vol. 4, 25. 44 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 269–70. 45 Drescher, Econocide, 35. 46 Testimony of Thomas King, London merchant, in Evidence to Consider the Slave Trade, vol. 1, 77, 75. 47 See Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 30; Drescher, Econocide, 35; and W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 49–50. 48 David Cooper, A Serious Address to the Rulers of America on the Inconsistency of Their Conduct Respecting Slavery (London, 1783). See also Thomas Day’s Letter to An American Planter (New York, 1784), written in 1776 but withheld from publication until 1784 because of Day’s sympathy for the Americans. Day’s letter criticized the inconsistency between American rhetoric and the persistence of slavery. See also Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, 62–3; and Davis, Age of Revolution, 398–9. 49 Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World (1785), reprinted in Richard Price, Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas, 116–51 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150. 50 Granville Sharp, Letter from Granville Sharp, Esq. Of London, to the Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes and others, Unlawfully held in Bondage (hereafter Letter to Maryland Society) (Baltimore: D. Graham, L. Yundt, and W. Patton, 1793), 6. 51 Price, Political Writings, 150. 52 D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), 282–3. See also Matthew Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 59, no. 3 (2002): 28–33, for evidence that the challenge of reconciling American ideals with the persistence of slavery continued to perplex British reformers into the nineteenth century. The assessment that Americans had “failed” to take action against slavery was a function of the optimism with which British sympathizers had greeted the Revolution itself and the ways that they had understood the discourse of the imperial crisis. Interpreting Revolutionary denunciations of “tyranny” and “slavery” as grounded in a commitment to liberty, equality, and ultimately emancipation, Sharp and other British abolitionists understood the Constitutional safeguards for slavery as a betrayal of their principles. In fact, black and

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54 55 56 57 58

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white Americans continued to work to eradicate slavery in the early national period with the result that slavery had ended in the northern states by 1830; see Zilversmit, First Emancipation, 139ff. Edward Rushton, Expostulatory Letter to George Washington … on his continuing to be a proprietor of slaves (Liverpool, 1797), 24, quoted in Davis, Age of Revolution, 400. Rushton (1756–1814), radical editor and author, became an abolitionist after being blinded by contagious ophthalmia contracted while serving on a slave ship. The exact implications of Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset v. Steuart have been the subject of lengthy debate. William R. Cotter summarizes the controversy and argues convincingly that the ruling in Somerset was much narrower than most abolitionists believed. In the absence of positive law supporting slavery in England, Mansfield denied the right of a master to remove his slave from England by force. However, the practical consequences of the case contributed to the de facto end of slavery in England; see Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England,” History 79, no. 255 (1994): 31–56. Nickolls, Letter to the Treasurer, 27. Ibid., Appendix, post 27 December 1787. Joseph Woods, Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes (London, 1784), 8, 9, 23. Granville Sharp to the Bishop of London, January 1785, quoted in Hoare, Memoirs, 426. Drescher, Econocide, 8, has criticized Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 178–96, for explaining the actions of British abolitionists as being motivated alternatively by laissezfaire and mercantilist theory; see also Drescher, “Abolitionist Expectations,” 41–66. Building on the work of Lowell Ragatz, Williams had argued that abolition and emancipation were consequences of the decline of the West Indian economy in the face of competition from East Indian sugar; see also Lowell J. Ragatz, A Guide for the Study of British Caribbean History, 1763–1834 (Washington, dc: US Government Printing Office, 1932). In Williams’s view, abolition and emancipation were responses to overproduction of sugar and attempts to permit free market forces to regulate supply. Williams went on to state that the preliminary act of 1806 restricting the supply of slaves to foreign colonies by British slave traders invoked mercantilism in an attempt to protect the British market from foreign competition. Drescher convincingly demolishes the Ragatz-Williams thesis of “decline,” but he discounts too readily the perception of decline once the West Indians lost their North American allies. Whatever the reality, the West Indian interests certainly reacted as though they were on the defensive in the 1780s and 1790s. For evidence of this perception, see the discussion of the eighteenth-century historian William Beckford in Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 118–49. Drescher, “Abolitionist Expectations,” 44–53.

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60 Davis, Age of Revolution, 443. 61 This was in fact Adam Smith’s view of the question (i.e., that slavery was inherently inefficient), although he also argued that free men would never relinquish dominion over their slaves; see Spencer J. Pack, “Slavery, Adam Smith’s Economic Vision and the Invisible Hand,” History of Economic Ideas 4, no. 1–2 (1996): 253–65. See also Woods, Thoughts on the Slavery, 17; Clarkson, Essay on the Impolicy, 17–18; Davis, Age of Revolution, 358–9, 368, 384; and Drescher, Econocide, 115. 62 Hoare, Memoirs, 362. 63 Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade, 32. See also the argument that the proposal to found a colony in Sierra Leone revealed white Britons’ ambivalence about the entitlement of black Britons to the rights of Englishmen, in Kathleen Wilson, “The Island Race: Captain Cook, Protestant Evangelicalism and the Construction of English National Identity,” in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds, Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850, 265–90 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 269. 64 Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade, 32. 65 Clarkson, Essay on the Impolicy, 17–18. 66 See, for example, Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History (London: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 168–71. See also Wahrman, “English Problem,” 1237. 67 See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 153; and Mason, “Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators,” 2. 68 Davis, Age of Revolution, 232. 69 Seymour Drescher, “Public Opinion and the Destruction of British Colonial Slavery,” in James Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, 22–48 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 29. 70 Davis, Age of Revolution, 343–468. 71 Wahrman, “English Problem,” 1250. See also Colley, Britons, 354. 72 Nickolls, Letter to the Treasurer, 27. 73 Clarkson, Essay on the Slavery, ix. See also Wilson, Sense of the People, 274–5. 74 See, for example, Richard Price’s 1759 sermon Britain’s Happiness and the Proper Improvement of It, reprinted in Price, Political Writings, 1–13; and William Wilberforce, Practical Christianity (London, 1797), 406. See also Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, 155–6. 75 John Wesley, Thoughts on Slavery (Philadelphia: J. Cruikshank, 1774), 48, 51–3, 55. 76 See Granville Sharp to Dr Benjamin Rush, 27 July 1774, in John A. Woods, “The Correspondence of Benjamin Rush and Granville Sharp, 1773–1809,” Journal of American Studies 1, no. 1 (1967): 1–38 at 10. 77 H.P. Ippel, “British Sermons and the American Revolution,” Journal of Religious History 12 (1982): 191–205 at 203–4. See also Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 166.

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78 Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 161–2. 79 William Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, quoted in Michael Craton, James Walvin, and D. Wright, eds, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Slaves and the British Empire: A Thematic Documentary (London: Longman, 1976), 220. 80 Sharp, Letter to Maryland Society, 7. 81 See, for example, the following from the “Introduction” to Price’s Observations, reprinted in Price, Political Writings, 116: “With heartfelt satisfaction I see the revolution in favour of universal liberty which has taken place in America, a revolution which opens a new prospect in human affairs and begins a new aera [sic] in the history of mankind.” 82 Price, Political Writings, 150. 83 Cooper, Serious Address, 3. 84 Price, Political Writings, 150. 85 Thomas, Honest Mind, 282–3; J. Pollock, Wilberforce (London: Constable, 1977), 188, 208, 228. 86 Sharp, Letter to Maryland Society, 2. 87 Ippel, “British Sermons,” 204. 88 See note 68. 89 See Newman, Rise of English Nationalism.

conclusion The English Atlantic Created a Man of Steele Who Reciprocated by Creating It 1 john m. murrin

When the academy celebrates the accomplishments of one of its own, the quality of the response becomes a good index of that person’s importance. A festschrift rarely sells well and seldom adds greatly to the reputations of the contributors. Many are tempted, no doubt, to pull something out of their files that has lain unfinished for years and polish it up quickly for the occasion. Nothing of that sort characterizes the essays in this collection. These contributions reflect serious research, much of it in archival sources, combined with careful thinking about difficult questions, most of which have been inspired by Ian K. Steele’s own writings. Gracious, evocative prose is another quality of these essays. All of these contributors understood at the outset that the only fitting tribute to a scholar of Steele’s stature is something that must impress the master himself as well as future readers. In 1968 Professor Steele published his revised doctoral dissertation, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720. By then, I had been teaching early American history at Washington University, St Louis, for five years and had, of course, developed my own lectures on the early modern British Empire, including the transition from the Lords of Trade (1675–96) to the Board of Trade (1696–1782). The Lords of Trade had begun as a permanent, powerful committee of the Privy Council that made major decisions about overseas colonies until the Glorious Revolution. It lost nearly all of its effectiveness under William III, who opened its meetings to all members of the Privy Council at a time when the pressures of the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) meant that nearly all members

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had more urgent things to do than discuss colonies or trade. Everyone’s responsibility turned into nobody’s responsibility, except for lower-ranking officials, such as William Blathwayt, who knew more about colonial affairs than anyone else in England, but he too had to accompany the king on his military campaigns and was often too far away to be effective. Parliament’s threat to create its own board to regulate trade and colonies, which in 1968 I suspected had something to do with English suspicions of William’s Dutch loyalties and the overseas competition between England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands (a possibility that I have never tried to investigate), drove William to action. During the parliamentary recess in 1696, he used his royal prerogative to create the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. Most historians call it the Board of Trade to avoid confusing students and each other, any of whom might mistake it for the earlier Lords of Trade. The board differed from its predecessor in that it had almost no real power – except to collect information, under oath if necessary, and to make suggestions to those government officials who did have power, which usually meant the Secretary of State for the Southern Department or the Privy Council. It also dealt with the Treasury and the Royal Navy. I remember thinking that the board was an interesting early attempt at government by experts, although I do not recall the source of this idea. Since the Restoration, the Crown had been torn between two alternatives. Should it appoint merchants to formulate mercantile and colonial policy, or would they simply use the power of the state to enrich themselves at everybody else’s expense? Should the government turn these decisions over instead to the peers and gentry, the men who actually ran the state? The difficulty with that option was that many of these people did not know enough about either commerce or colonies to make wise decisions about them. The Board of Trade promised to bring together men with sufficient knowledge about these subjects to offer intelligent advice to the peers and gentlemen who did govern England. Maybe the king should have been more skeptical. Or maybe he was just skeptical enough not to give the board real power. While it was being established, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke were launching England’s “great recoinage.” As master of the mint, Newton, strongly supported by Locke, who was an expert on monetary questions, called in all the coinage of the kingdom, much of which had been clipped and debased, and ordered that it be reminted and standardized. The resulting shortage of money created a severe fiscal and economic crisis that bordered on disaster.2 In 1968 I thought that I knew quite a bit about the Board of Trade and wondered whether I should read Professor Steele’s book right

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away or wait a year or three. I read it just before I reached that point in my lectures, and it changed the substance of my teaching. One of Steele’s most fascinating discoveries was the continuing tension between Blathwayt, a Tory, and Locke, the most philosophical spokesman for the Whigs. The board was quite active while King William lived, but Blathwayt and Locke, who evidently despised one another, seldom attended the same sessions. Blathwayt was away with the king most summers, and Locke stayed in the country during the winter. Whoever did show up usually had enough persuasive ability to win over the other commissioners. In other words, the board did not advocate consistent Tory or Whig policies. Through the Privy Council, it imposed Lockean reforms on Virginia and New York and tougher imperial policies inspired by Blathwayt on most other colonies. Steele also showed that the board exhausted most of its creative energies early in Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14), that most members became poorly informed political time-servers after the Whigs took full control of the government in 1707, and that it continued to lose touch with colonial affairs after the Tories gained power in 1710, a pattern that lasted into the years of the Hanoverian Succession. The book remains an impressive achievement. Unlike John Shy, I had never heard of Steele’s second book, Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle for Canada, 1689–1760 (1969), until I began preparing for the September 2003 conference at which most of the essays in this volume were presented. The book was not reviewed in American journals, was never purchased by the Firestone Library at Princeton, nor, as Shy points out, by seven of the major research libraries of Big Ten universities, which, like most academic libraries in the United States, apparently regarded it as just another Canadian textbook. Because Shy’s chapter includes an admirable discussion of this book, I need add nothing about it here except to announce my intention of acquiring a copy, if I can find one. Steele’s next major project first came to my attention when he published his “Time, Communications and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702,” in American Studies, a British journal, in 1974.3 This essay used the death of King William and the declaration of war with France as a way to measure the speed and efficiency of transatlantic communications. It opened up so many intriguing possibilities that I believe I assigned it in my graduate seminar on the colonial period (as I still described the course at the time) whenever I taught it until my retirement in 2003. Steele worked out these implications in his extraordinary book The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (1986), a study that has done more than any other to invent

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what we now call “Atlantic history.” Richard Johnson, in his chapter in this volume, neatly summarizes the major theme: “we must understand the eighteenth-century English Atlantic world as one of sea separated by land, not land by sea.” The Atlantic was not a moat that sustained mother country and colonies in splendid isolation from each other, a function that it had often served in the early seventeenth century. It was, instead, a highway that linked them together, and in the sixty-five years after 1675, the intensity of these links grew spectacularly. English transatlantic shipping at least doubled in a single lifetime before 1740. Charles Town, which did not even exist before 1680, became a major player, its commerce sustaining about eighty ships per year by 1740. In an even more impressive trend, communications improved dramatically with the establishment of newspapers in London, in English provincial towns beginning in the 1690s, in Scotland and Ireland, in Boston by 1704, Jamaica in 1718, Philadelphia by 1719, New York in 1725, and both Virginia and South Carolina in the 1730s. In 1738 Barbados became the first colony to publish a newspaper that appeared twice a week. Although I do not recall Steele ever making the point, the contrast with the French and Spanish empires was striking. No French or Spanish colony published a newspaper before 1776. For that matter, nothing that the British or the Dutch would have recognized as a newspaper appeared in Paris. But in the British Atlantic world, local post offices, organized into an imperial system mostly during Anne’s reign, facilitated the distribution of the news. An efficient system of packet boats during most of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) provided quick passage to the West Indies, with conventional commercial carriers taking over from there. “A study that ends in 1740,” Steele explains in his preface, “avoids the teleological preoccupations that the American Revolution has imposed on much of the study of American colonial history, yet communications continued to develop after 1740, with erratic but substantial growth in shipping, newspapers, and postal services and the coming of a regular packet boat service to New York after 1755. Those of us who (with the aid of instant electronic communication) have witnessed the evaporation of empires built in the age of sail,” he adds wryly, “can appreciate that increasing familiarity can breed discontent.”4 In my judgment, Steele has won this argument. In a recent issue of Historically Speaking, Pauline Maier observes (laments?) that the historiography of the American Revolution is now almost completely divorced from the historiography of the colonies in previous generations. A distinguished panel of commentators takes issue with her on several points but not on that central question. When I last taught the Revolution in 1999, I had to point out to both undergraduates and graduate

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students that nearly all of the historical analysis of the coming of the Revolution and the Revolutionary War that they would read was at least thirty years old. This time gap suggests that we ought to be using Steele’s insights to place the Revolution in a new context. The Revolution was not a crisis of imperial disintegration. It was a crisis of imperial integration that the British state could not handle, in large part because it was all happening too rapidly for the norms and customs of an eighteenth-century polity.5 The cultural, religious, economic, and migratory trends within the empire were drawing its parts together more rapidly than many people could cope with. Think of Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, who became the first secretary of state for the American colonies in 1768. He panicked when he realized that American land was attracting his Irish tenants across the Atlantic, shrinking his rent rolls, and threatening his quality of life. He launched preliminary policies designed to restrict emigration from Britain but had to leave office before he completed them. Naturally, he became a hardliner on American questions.6 Many historians have contributed to our understanding of this pattern. Norman Fiering has explained the impact of the English enlightenment on the colonies, especially that of Archbishop John Tillotson, who was admired even in Boston. T.H. Breen, Cary Carson, Lois Green Carr, and Lorena Walsh have given us the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century and have shown that, after 1730 or 1740 (take-off dates varied from one colony to another), colonial consumption of British imports was growing even more rapidly than population, which doubled roughly every twenty-five years. Bernard Bailyn has analyzed in wonderful detail patterns of migration from England and Scotland to the colonies after the Seven Years’ War. And Susan O’Brien, Michael Crawford, Ned Landsman, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have demonstrated that the Great Awakening was an Atlantic event, certainly not just a North American revival. But the point remains that, at several levels, Ian Steele started this trend.7 In terms of earlier historiography, Steele has shown us what can still be vital and vibrant about the “imperial school” of early American history. It arose in angry reaction against the nationalistic pieties of George Bancroft and in exasperation at the eagerness of the public to read Bancroft, not Herbert Levi Osgood, at Columbia University, his student George Louis Beer (although wealthy and learned, he never got an academic appointment, almost certainly because he was Jewish), and Charles McLean Andrews at Yale University. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, all three insisted that England, not the future United States, provided the one proper perspective from which the American colonies should be examined. They made tremendous

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contributions, especially to our understanding of the institutional history of the empire and of individual colonies. But they had little sense of how societies work. Thus Andrews lumped Virginia with Massachusetts because both were organized by joint-stock companies, Barbados with Maryland because they began as proprietary colonies, and Jamaica with New York because both became English through conquest. He barely recognized Virginia and Maryland as part of a Chesapeake society of tobacco planters or Barbados and Jamaica as prime movers in the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century.8 When I began teaching in 1963, I thought that the imperial school was self-destructing before my eyes in the Sisyphusean efforts of Lawrence Henry Gipson, who just barely lived long enough to complete his fifteen-volume history, The British Empire before the American Revolution (1936–70). The harder he pushed his research, the more it undercut the organizing principles of the imperial school. He made the empire so benevolent, considerate, rational, and heroic that he could detect no plausible reason why thousands of settlers fiercely objected to the new imperial policies imposed on them between 1763 and 1775. After almost ninety years of scholarship, the imperial school as embodied in Gipson came up with no explanation for the Revolution other than the one with which Bancroft had started: the colonists were becoming Americans. Or, as Bancroft might have phrased it, divine providence had decreed that a new American nation would emerge on the western shores of the Atlantic. In the first volume of his ten-volume history, Bancroft even entitled his chapter on Roanoke “England Takes Possession of the United States.”9 Steele revitalized what had been the imperial school by broadening its base and by emphasizing cultural dimensions, especially what had almost been Canada’s distinctive bastion in early modern studies: the history of communications. He followed in the distinguished tradition of Harold Innis on the fur trade and Marshall McLuhan on communications. Unlike many historians of this period in the United States, he never dichotomized Atlantic history against “frontier” history. He knew that they were intimately connected, not just through the fur trade but also through warfare. I suspect that many of my American colleagues were surprised to see him turn from the English Atlantic to warfare in early North America. To me it seemed, and still seems, a logical progression.10 Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (1990) is a brilliant microstudy of the 1757 campaign that determined what the French, the various Amerindian nations that participated, the British army, and British provincial (colonial) volunteers would think of one another for the rest of the war. It became a redefining moment for them all. Pierre

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de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, a native of New France, had arrived as governor general of the colony in 1755 and soon found himself in command of the army, too, after its own general, Jean Armand, Baron de Dieskau, was wounded and captured near Lac St Sacrement, which the British had recently renamed Lake George. Vaudreuil understood the strategy and the necessities of frontier warfare. While he directed operations in New France, the French kept winning. He raised Amerindian forces by offering them traditional rewards: booty and captives. By then most of his Native allies were more interested in ransoming captives (or adopting them) than in torturing them to death, which made this type of warfare less horrifying than it had been, but it did amount to a terroristic strategy designed to compel the British and the colonists to disperse their forces to protect a vast area. In 1756 Louis Joseph, marquis de Montcalm, arrived from France to take charge of military operations. He brought with him Enlightenment ideas of warfare, and after seeing what the alternative was in the campaign that took Oswego from the British in 1756, he led against Fort William Henry, a British outpost at the southern end of Lake Champlain, the largest army of French professionals, Canadien militia, and Amerindian warriors (raised by Vaudreuil under the usual terms) that ever mustered together in the entire history of New France. After a brief siege, the British and provincials agreed to surrender. Montcalm promised them “the honours of war,” which included the right to keep what personal possessions individuals could carry with them and to march unmolested to Fort Edward at the headwaters of the Hudson River. In short, Montcalm insisted that his Amerindian allies accept European rules of war. Instead, they felt betrayed and began to kill the wounded left in the fort, to loot the retreating force, to kill those who tried to defend their personal possessions, and to carry many others into captivity. Never again would the French be able to raise a sizable force of Amerindians outside the St Lawrence Valley itself. At first, when only about 600 survivors made it to Fort Edward, they believed that something like 1,700 people had been massacred. The toll was much lower once refugees who arrived later and known captives were tallied. At least 69 were killed, and the fate of another 115 has never been accounted for, which puts the death toll under 10 per cent, not near 75 per cent. Nonetheless, the British and colonists felt betrayed by Montcalm, despite his considerable efforts to protect the British and colonial forces from their pursuers. The British never again offered the honours of war to a surrendering French force. In Warpaths: Invasions of North America (1994), Steele traces, on a continental scale, the consequences of these tensions and misunderstandings for imperial warfare on the western side of the Atlantic.

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Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, wars in North America had been fought far more on Amerindian than on European terms, although every invader did try to build and fortify some kind of base for the colony’s security. Steele examines the intrusion of the Spanish into Florida in the late sixteenth century and the English into Virginia, the Dutch into what later became known as the Hudson Valley, English dissenters into New England, and the French into the St Lawrence Valley and the Great Lakes in the early seventeenth century. Steele then examines the clash of these empires against one another beginning in the 1680s. All of them needed Amerindian allies to survive. At no point did these clashes pit only Europeans against Amerindians. But Montcalm’s inability to secure significant numbers of Amerindian allies after the capture of Fort William Henry in 1757 turned the conflict into the first European war in North America. It included several major sieges – by the French at Oswego and Fort William Henry and by the British at Louisbourg, Quebec, Montreal, and several smaller fortifications. The war had one disastrous frontal assault by the British at Ticonderoga in 1758, and, on the Plains of Abraham in September 1759, it produced the first European battle on an open field on North American soil, a clash that was fatal to both commanders, Montcalm with the French and James Wolfe with the British. For Francis Parkman writing in the nineteenth century, both men were heroes, even though Wolfe’s victory meant the eventual triumph of Protestantism, liberty, and democracy across the continent, while Montcalm stood for absolutism, Catholicism, and a decaying feudal order. Steele’s judgment is much more ironic. Montcalm’s defeat owed far more to his attempt to impose Enlightenment standards on North American warfare than to any inherent deficiencies in the social order of New France.11 When France ceded North America east of the Mississippi to Britain in the Peace of Paris (1763), the Amerindians responded with Pontiac’s War. General Sir Jeffrey Amherst had been treating them as conquered subjects of King George III. They knew they had not been conquered, whatever European diplomats chose to believe. They retaliated by destroying all of Britain’s western outposts except those at Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt. In the aftermath of this conflict, Amerindians again became allies rather than subjects, and the British learned, painfully, to treat with them largely as the French had done into 1757. Perhaps the warriors allied with Pontiac did not win a military victory between 1763 and 1765, but in Steele’s judgment they definitely won the peace. Commenting on the seventeen essays in this collection is both an intimidating and a humbling experience. The notes alone become a

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constant reminder of how many important studies this historian has not been able to read in the past ten or twenty years. Richard R. Johnson is another early Americanist who, in my judgment, rescued and resuscitated the imperial school when its condition seemed terminal. His Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (1981) is still the best study of that region’s politics before and after the Glorious Revolution. Even those cantankerous colonies learned to appreciate the English empire and their place within it as the newly Protestant monarchy of William and Mary became the most important bulwark against Louis XIV’s expansionist aspirations and his ruthless persecution of Protestants elsewhere. Johnson also responded firmly but courteously when, in his judgment, Stephen Saunders Webb tried to make the emerging English empire more militaristic than its martial resources allowed it to be, whatever the aspirations of some of its soldier-governors. Johnson’s tribute to Steele is perceptive and persuasive and is embedded in prose that sparkles with wisdom, wit, and delightful wordplay: “the white scholar’s burden”; imperial politics as “the pursuit of business by other means”; and Ian’s books on war as “cold Steele, as it were.”12 John Shy’s admiration for Steele is as deep as Johnson’s. He was disappointed, but is no longer surprised, that a group of school teachers to whom he assigned Warpaths told him that they found Francis Parkman more engaging and exciting. Shy likens the contrast to that between Jomini and Clausewitz after the Napoleonic wars. Everyone with an interest in military history read Jomini; hardly anyone ever heard of Clausewitz until after Prussia’s great victories over Austria and France created the German Empire by 1871 and made it the most feared military power in Europe. People finally began to ask what members of the Prussian General Staff had been reading in previous decades. The answer, of course, was Clausewitz, who, like Steele, was far more interested in getting things right than in telling a great story. The three contributions in part 2, “Political Economy,” fit together quite nicely. They also indicate that this volume is organized to reflect the chronological progression of Steele’s own scholarship. All of these essays derive to some degree from Politics of Colonial Policy. Barbara Murison’s study of William Blathwayt is an important contribution to the early history of the English empire. To this reader, perhaps her most striking point is her observation that Blathwayt was a sincere admirer of Thomas Hobbes. That discovery establishes a new framework for the tension between Blathwayt and Locke in the early years of the Board of Trade, as laid out in Steele’s Politics of Colonial Policy. Not only did the two men disagree, but their clashes became an arena of

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conflict that pitted England’s two greatest seventeenth-century political philosophers – Hobbes and Locke – against one another. In “Patronage and Governance in Francis Nicholson’s Empire,” Randy Dunn takes on a man who usually won and held the respect of his superiors while often terrifying those over whom he ruled. The essay concentrates on his reasonably successful terms as governor in Maryland and Virginia, where he even laid out new capitals in both provinces. Although recalled from both, officials in London admired what he had accomplished and kept him on their list of men to be consulted with and employed in other imperial posts. Two questions do arise about Nicholson. First, had Dunn traced Nicholson’s career through his other assignments, how would we evaluate his overall accomplishments? He was almost the last Englishman to leave Tangier before the English evacuated their garrison and destroyed the city. Jacob Leisler’s revolt in 1689 drove him from New York. Later, he established English authority, or at least an English presence, in Nova Scotia, but it remained tenuous at best. His term as the first royal governor of South Carolina led almost to a complete political meltdown of the colony’s political system in the late 1720s. Moreover, when Nicholson replaced Sir Edmund Andros as governor of Virginia, he carried with him a set of royal instructions that set the tone, and much of the substance, of Virginia politics for the next two decades. Locke, with the assistance of Rev. James Blair, who soon turned against Nicholson, hoped to transform Virginia (and New York) into societies that favoured moderate and small planters over great ones.13 Nicholson was also told to compile an accurate roster of quitrents, which he did, and was forbidden to issue large land grants that could be used for speculative purposes. In addition, he was commanded to support the Church of England in the colonies, which he did in both Maryland and Virginia. During his second Virginia administration, he won the support of most members of the House of Burgesses and most ordinary clergy, at the price of alienating most great planters, especially members of the Council, and James Blair, who successfully worked the imperial clientage system to get Nicholson recalled. But these issues resurfaced during the administration of Alexander Spotswood (1710–22) in Virginia until, after prolonged conflict with both houses of the legislature from 1715 to 1720, he restored peace with the great planters by making large land grants available once again, of which he took a sizable share. Virginia’s governors learned, in effect, that they could rule Virginia but not transform it. Because the Board of Trade had become much more complacent by then, both the

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British state and Virginia’s great planters were happy to live with Spotswood’s compromises.14 As Stacy L. Lorenz shows, Governor Sir William Gooch became the principal beneficiary of this new system and also demonstrated how much it could accomplish. Lorenz correctly sees Virginia’s Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730 as a challenge to Gooch’s political skills. He turned that legislation into a brilliant success, both by persuading the administration of Sir Robert Walpole to accept it, even though it would reduce British customs revenues, and by making it clear to Virginians that he was interested in improving the quality and therefore the price of tobacco, not in using the patronage that the system would provide to manipulate the House of Burgesses. Spotswood, Lorenz reminds us, had passed a similar measure and then rewarded a majority of the Burgesses with lucrative tobacco inspectorships. When Queen Anne inconsiderately died in 1714, forcing the governor to dissolve the Burgesses and hold new elections, the voters swept the new inspectors from the house in 1715, thereby inaugurating the five years of political crisis that finally taught Spotswood what a royal governor could and could not do in a colony such as Virginia. He learned that, to rule successfully in a plantation society, a governor had to rely on persuasion and example. The blatant use of patronage would be counterproductive. As Lorenz recognizes, in the southern mainland colonies the formula for political stability required that the governor understand and accept the values that, in Britain, were associated with the “country” opposition, not with Walpole’s “court” politics. Lorenz also demonstrates that, for a governor as principled as Gooch, transatlantic politics and patronage could enable him to advocate and implement what he considered desirable policies even in an empire organized mostly around the pursuit of patronage. His proposed military reforms in the 1740s were less successful, but Gooch never lost the respect and even the affections of the planters whom he had been sent to govern. The contributions to part 3 have all been inspired by Steele’s The English Atlantic, and they pursue their themes in some surprising directions. Few early American or Atlantic historians have paid much attention to Bermuda beyond recounting the shipwreck that led to its founding. Neil Kennedy demonstrates what a missed opportunity that has been. Although the islands had little direct trade with Britain and thus did not attract much attention in London, this colony – unlike Virginia – consistently brought modest profits to its investors and very quickly established itself as a much healthier society than either Virginia or Maryland and as a dynamic Atlantic trading partner with many other colonies. I rather hope that Kennedy will pursue these themes into the eighteenth century. As Elaine Foreman Crane’s long-term project will

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show some day, Bermuda’s maritime commitments kept so many men at sea that often the islands had a female majority, with intriguing consequences that she has yet to reveal. In addition, Bermuda shipping by the 1720s gained control of such a significant percentage of New York City’s commerce that it provoked a political crisis in the colony.15 To establish and sustain its presence in the Atlantic during the age of sail, England needed access to enormous supplies of trees. Most of the kingdom’s forests had already been depleted by the seventeenth century, except for those still held by the Crown. That supply was not large enough to maintain the navy, much less the merchant marine, for very long, but Sara Morrison shows that, in time of war when overseas supplies could be threatened, the royal forests could make the difference in keeping the navy afloat. Her revised dissertation promises to be the best study since R.G. Albion’s Forests and Seapower (1926), a classic that she treats with great respect but also goes beyond in several areas. Albion criticized the effectiveness of royal forest policy under the Stuarts. Morrison is impressed with how much these policies accomplished after the Restoration despite the difficulties that had to be overcome. The English state realized both that oak trees had to be approximately a century old to be suitable for use by the navy and that it had to establish policies to achieve this objective by stages so that some trees would always be coming available. Its sense of what we would call ecology and conservation was quite remarkable. One has to wonder how its level of success compared with that of other Atlantic Great Powers in the same era, all of whom faced similar problems. Until I read Michael Dove’s essay on trade with Hudson’s Bay, the only information that I had on the subject was what I had picked up from Steele’s The English Atlantic. Dove adds a great deal. We learn just how threatening French hostilities were to the Hudson’s Bay Company during the War of the Spanish Succession, how the company was able to train a succession of ship captains who could navigate, with great success after the Treaty of Utrecht, some of the most treacherous waters in the world, and much about what happened to the trade after 1740, where Steele leaves off. Daniel Baugh’s superb contribution will leave readers wondering how and why England became the world’s greatest naval power. The geography of the English Channel mostly worked against England and in favour of France. Cross-Channel invasions of France were extremely difficult to execute successfully. England’s south coast presented a much better series of targets, as William of Orange demonstrated when he took advantage of “the Protestant wind” that allowed him to cross the Channel and invade England while the English fleet could not leave its ports.

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Professor Baugh’s lucid essays often point out obvious patterns that the rest of us have managed not to perceive. The Channel coast of England would have been easier to invade than the Channel or Atlantic coasts of France. On the other hand, while a French invading force could use the prevailing westerlies to enter the Channel, they might not be able to get out again if anything went wrong. Still, the French had more advantages than the English, and by the eighteenth century they were building better ships. Baugh persuades me that the English put together the world’s most powerful navy because nothing less could enable them to protect their island from French invasion (or Franco-Spanish, as in 1779). The disadvantages of being an island kingdom, not the advantages, explain British naval supremacy by the eighteenth century. The three essays in part 4 expand on Steele’s interest in warfare. Jon W. Parmenter’s “Onenwahatirighsi” is a deeply revisionist study of Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois, or Six Nations) policies from the early 1720s into the first two years of the Seven Years’ War. His principal source is the manuscript minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, men who have been treated rather badly by other historians and often by their own contemporaries. Most other historians have not gone beyond Peter Wraxall’s An Abridgement of the Indian Affairs … of New York, which covered the years 1678 to 1751 and was published in 1754. Wraxall, a strong supporter of William Johnson, who permanently supplanted the commissioners in the management of Indian affairs when he became the empire’s first superintendent of Indian affairs for the Northern Department after the Albany Congress of 1754, had every reason to disparage the achievements of the commissioners. As a British imperialist, he was not likely to defend the commissioners’ policies. Parmenter’s essay makes better sense of the “illegal” Albany-Montreal trade than anything else I have ever read. He rightly insists that the Haudenosaunee considered themselves neutrals in the imperial contests of the eighteenth century and that they also tried to retain friendly relations with their cousins who had returned to the St Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth century, most of whom were now Catholics. Continuing trade between them also meant trade between Albany and Montreal, where the Haudenosaunee and their Canadian cousins got their European goods in exchange for furs. The commissioners understood the importance of this trade, that the middle men in this commerce were always the Haudenosaunee, not either the Dutch or the French, and that imperial war threatened to jeopardize the whole system. Governors George Clinton of New York and William Shirley of Massachusetts, William Johnson, the various professional

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commanders of the British army in the 1750s, and other imperial officials expected the Confederacy to join Britain in the attempt to conquer New France. The Haudenosaunee never embraced this objective, but they were clever enough to prevent a complete rupture. Parmenter also shows that the Albany Commissioners, despite some corruption, were usually effective in dealing with the Confederation’s concerns about freedom of trade; with who had legal jurisdiction in criminal cases involving clashes between settlers and Amerindians; with disputes over land transactions, most of which, Parmenter shows, have been misunderstood by historians; and of course with the whole issue of diplomatic neutrality. This densely documented essay – almost every sentence has its own note, some of which are quite lengthy – will surely be recognized as a contribution with the power to redefine our understanding of the Six Nations in the eighteenth century. Alexander V. Campbell’s essay is a prime example of how Atlantic history can become frontier history. He traces the impact of North America on the men (and often their families) recruited in both Europe and the Middle Colonies into the Royal American Regiment, which served in North America from 1755 to 1772. Many volunteered as a way of paying for transportation to America, sometimes for the recruit’s entire family. Most were eager to remain there after their enlistments expired, and often a group of veterans settled near one another, typically in New York, after the war ended. I was surprised at how often Campbell found former officers cooperating closely with former enlisted men in the settlement process and cannot help but wonder what this phenomenon might tell us about the regiment’s internal discipline during the war. In any event, Campbell makes a convincing case for treating the Royal Americans as an “Atlantic microcosm.” Michelle A. Hamilton demonstrates how difficult it was for the army to provision and quarter its various western garrisons between the fall of Montreal and the British decision to evacuate these posts by 1773. The soldiers who arrived as conquerors soon discovered that their survival depended heavily on their ability to win cooperation – and supplies – from those whom they thought they had subdued: the French and the Indians. Because the Treaty of Paris promised to respect French property titles, the British faced a dilemma once they learned that individual Frenchmen often owned the land within these forts and that the army would have to pay rents to quarter soldiers there. Establishing secure and effective supply lines out of Niagara and Detroit was never easy, especially in the early years. Sheer necessity often forced the army to purchase provisions, usually in exchange for gunpowder, from either the French, the Indians, or both. Pontiac’s War understandably made British commanders farther east quite nervous about

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these arrangements. After 1765, British supplies slowly began to flow more copiously and efficiently. The final four essays, placed together under the rubric of “Social History,” display the range of topics that have inspired admirers and students of Ian Steele. David Norton explores the painful and often sad life of Samson Occom, the first graduate of Eleazer Wheelock’s Indian School in Lebanon, Connecticut, who later went to England, where he raised more than £10,000 for the school. To Occom’s anger and mortification, Wheelock moved the school to Hanover, New Hampshire, and used the donations to establish Dartmouth College, an evangelical institution mostly for white boys, although it did admit an occasional Amerindian. Occom faced other humiliations. No white congregation would engage him as its minister, and he had to accept a pulpit among the desperately poor Montauk on the eastern end of Long Island. Depressed, he often drank too much, accepted rebukes from some of his white supporters, and struggled to overcome this weakness. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, he helped to organize a removal of many Amerindians to Oneida land in western New York. The migration had to be postponed until after the war, but eventually Occom and the others established the new community of Brothertown, in which he became a major leader. Norton argues that, as a leader, Occom drew on his traditional Amerindian roles as a sachem and as a shaman. His case for the role of sachem is strong, for it draws on the long controversy among Connecticut’s Mohegans over who should control the land after the death of a sachem in the 1760s. Norton’s argument for Occom as shaman rests mostly on his willingness to use music in his worship services, something on which traditional Congregationalists had frowned. Yet this pattern was changing in the eighteenth century. In the twenty years before George Whitefield’s spectacular evangelical tour of 1740–41, numerous congregations agreed to adopt what contemporaries called “regular singing.” Others, of course, insisted on retaining the old way, in which only Psalms could be sung, although not in harmony. By the 1730s even Jonathan Edwards maintained a four-part choir in his Northampton Congregation. When James Davenport established his “Shepherd’s Tent” at New London in 1743, his converts disturbed contemporaries by singing noisily while parading through the streets. I do not deny that Occom could indeed have been drawing upon his Amerindian heritage when he added music to the forms of worship that he organized, but he could also have tapped into a recent set of evangelical innovations that were actually quite similar.16 Kenneth A. Lockridge’s stunningly original essay on the Hesselius brothers provides the kind of entrée into the eighteenth-century

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Middle Colonies that I kept looking for but never found in my forty years of teaching. Lockridge squeezes more significance out of his extremely limited sources than I would have believed possible. He has Gustavus Hesselius’s two paintings of Delaware Indian chiefs in the 1730s, one lengthy surviving letter that Gustavus wrote to his mother in Sweden two years after he arrived in Pennsylvania, and a miscellany of other collateral materials, from which he pieces together, quite convincingly, his larger story. Gustavus was born a Lutheran in Sweden, married a Calvinist in Pennsylvania, learned to appreciate Amerindian spirituality, joined the Moravian Brethren for several years, for whom he painted the first Crucifixion scene in British American history, and, in sum, explored nearly all of the positive possibilities of ethnic and religious pluralism. At a lower level of Middle Colony society, so did Conrad Weiser, but he lacked the artistic gifts of Gustavus. Gustavus, Lockridge shows, had much to overcome before his growth into genuine tolerance could take hold. The Indians and Pennsylvania’s ethnic and religious pluralism nauseated him at first, for he came from a homogeneous, orderly European society. To put that nausea in context, Lockridge does what almost no other early American historian could do. He offers us a telling sketch of Sweden in the age of the mad warrior king Charles XII. Gustavus Hesselius would not have been a portrait painter without his Swedish heritage, but he also had to overcome much of what he no doubt took for granted when he arrived in Pennsylvania. I wish I still had an opportunity to teach with this essay, to introduce modern American students to the painful birth and tormented adolescence of toleration and cultural pluralism in their early American homeland.17 Nancy L. Rhoden is still in the early stages of an immensely ambitious project on Virginia. She is asking what connections existed between the rejection of monarchy and the rise of popular politics, on the one hand, and the continuing efforts of great planters in particular to sustain their patriarchal authority within their families, on the other hand. As she points out, patriarchy and paternalism were rather recent phenomena in the mid-eighteenth century. Before then, few men had lived long enough to see their children to adulthood, and hardly any remained alive to enjoy their grandchildren. Much of that pattern remained conspicuous within the Revolutionary generation. For example, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson lost both parents before reaching adulthood. Yet by then the urge to become true patriarchs was becoming evident among their contemporaries. Did the Revolutionary quarrel with patriarchy undermine the authority of wealthy fathers in their own households? If so, did this tendency become a crisis, or was it just a blip in what had been and

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possibly continued to be the rise of patriarchy? Many antebellum historians insist that the institution was still thriving as late as 1860. Rhoden gives us two case studies: Landon Carter, his son, and grandson; and Richard Henry Lee and his family, especially his two sons. Carter provides, I think, an example of a patriarch who did not know how to play the role. He was twenty-two when he inherited his plantations in 1732, but when he died in 1778 his oldest son, Robert Wormeley Carter, was in his forties and still living under his father’s roof with his own wife and son. Landon never gave Robert Wormeley anything useful to do but then complained about his idleness, dissipation, and his wilful failure to show proper respect to Landon. Virginia, it seems, had almost no experience that might advise men how to treat their adult sons. Landon had three older brothers who had been forced to wait longer than he for their inheritances. One wonders what kind of relations they were able to sustain with their own father, Robert “King” Carter, but unfortunately they have left us no diaries. Rhoden demonstrates that Landon saw a direct connection between the erosion of public authority in Virginia and the behaviour of his undutiful son. One wonders whether Robert Wormeley ever linked his frequent quarrels with his father to the larger Revolutionary movement swirling around them, but he too kept no diary. Both father and son supported American independence despite the risks. Richard Henry Lee, unlike Landon Carter, sent his two sons to Europe for their education, where they were supervised by two uncles. The transatlantic correspondence among the three adult Lee brothers tells us most of what we know about relationships and tensions within the family. The adult Lees were rather disappointed with the behaviour of the oldest boy but pleased with the development of his younger brother. Richard Henry Lee was not as wealthy as Landon Carter and thus more worried about his sons’ expenses, but tensions between father and sons, who were separated by 3,000 miles, never became as raw, direct, and embittered as they often were in Carter’s household. The Lees seem to have been a middling case. Maybe patriarchy was in trouble, maybe not. There is no easy way to find out. In any case, Rhoden has set herself an enormous task and given us a preliminary look at where it may lead her. Margaret Kellow connects the transatlantic antislavery movement with the American Revolution in challenging ways. Before and during the Revolutionary War, British antislavery advocates tended to be proAmerican in their sympathies and expected the young United States to set the pace in freeing the slaves. Unless they did so, warned Richard Price, perhaps America’s warmest advocate, the Revolution would be a failure. When the Federal Constitution recognized slavery and even protected the African slave trade for the next twenty years, the antislavery

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initiative passed to the British, who used it to mount an increasingly effective campaign against the slave trade and to marginalize West Indian planters in British public life. This initiative, its advocates believed, restored Britain to world leadership in the spread of liberty, a position that the American Revolution had threatened to destroy. Kellow’s essay is elegant and persuasive and has recently been vindicated in important new studies by Cassandra Pybus and Simon Schama.18 Perhaps the best way to close an essay summarizing a volume of essays that honour Ian K. Steele is to let him speak for himself. I have chosen passages from one of his best-known historiographical essays, a genre that is not famous for producing one or two-sentence zingers. Early American historians, he observes, “have become very aware of the cooperation and conflict between ‘history’ as a scholarly discipline and ‘heritage’ as a conscious force in political and cultural fulfillment. History is no longer past politics; it is often present politics.” In discussing the rich new literature on African slavery in the British colonies, he notes, “For some scholars, slaves were the first modern Americans. Forced from their family, community, language, and religion, stripped of much of their culture, they struggled to create new social contexts and a new creole language with which to survive and combat colonial slavery in the Americas.” He has urged fellow historians to be less extreme in the way that they dichotomize racial tensions, especially between settlers and Amerindians. “As is true in other respects,” he observes, “scholars who are admirably sensitive regarding Amerindian perceptions are unwilling to offer the same tolerance and empathy to European colonials.” “Historians of early modern America,” he adds, “need to remember the power of race, but do we need to reinforce it?” “Although no one ever lived, prayed, or died for the Atlantic world, this approach has strengths, including an escape from Anglocentrism … The interwoven lives of Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans may well prove more interesting and significant than what have been much-tooheroic efforts to treat them separately.” “Having learned the encouraging ‘truth’ that gender, race, and ethnicity are learned cultural constructs, can we continue to use them as our categories for segregating the dead?” “Neither those who revel in the tumultuous variety of recent scholarship, nor those who enjoy seeking patterns within it, see much to lament in the passing of what was once the tidy domain of colonial American history.” Finally, all of us can appreciate the quiet irony in one of his rare remarks about the American Revolution. “British migrants were persistent colonizers,” he notes, “who eventually came to believe they were the colonized.”19

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notes 1 My thanks to Mary R. Murrin for her advice and suggestions. 2 Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698,” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter, wmq) 3d ser. 14 (1957): 370–402. 3 Ian K. Steele, “Time, Communications and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702,” American Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 1–21. 4 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), ix. 5 Pauline Maier, Edward G. Gray, Don Higginbotham, Peter S. Onuf, Paul A. Rahe, and Jack Rakove, “The State of Early American History: A Forum,” Historically Speaking, 6 (2005): 19–32; John M. Murrin, “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,” in Michael L. Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds, Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, 65–90 (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 6 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), 29–36. 7 Norman Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly, 54 (1981): 307–44; T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994), a volume that contains essays by Carr and Walsh, by Breen, and by Carson, among others; Bailyn, Voyagers to the West; Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 811–32;, Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ned Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (New York: Twayne, 1997); and Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 8 Various programmatic statements by these authors appeared in the Political Science Quarterly in the 1880s and in early volumes of the American Historical Association’s Annual Report. Their major works include, George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York: Macmillan, 1908); George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Herbert Levi Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1904); Herbert Levi Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924); and Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–38).

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9 George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent, 17th ed. (Boston, 1859), vol. 1, ch. 3 at 74. 10 See especially Harold A. Innis, Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956). 11 Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, France and England in North America, Part Seventh (Boston: Little Brown, 1902). Steele is not the first Canadian to be critical of Montcalm’s leadership. See especially Guy Frégault, Canada: The War of the Conquest (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969), a translation of La Guerre de la Conquête (1955). 12 Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979); Richard R. Johnson, “The Imperial Webb: The Thesis of Garrison Government in Early America Considered,” wmq 43 (1986): 408–30. See also Webb’s “The Data and Theory of Restoration Empire,” ibid., 431–59; and Johnson’s rejoinder, in wmq 44 (1987): 158–60. 13 Michael G. Kammen, ed., “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74 (1966): 141–69. For the crisis in South Carolina politics under Nicholson, see Gary Hewitt, “Land and People: The Political Economy of Expansion in South Carolina and Georgia, 1690–1745” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1996). 14 For an excellent and concise analysis of Virginia politics within an Atlantic context in the era of Spotswood and Gooch, see David Alan Williams, “AngloVirginia Politics, 1690–1735,” in Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown, eds, Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675–1775, 76–91 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970). 15 The only discussion I have ever seen of Bermuda shipping and New York politics in the 1720s is in Beverly W. McAnear, “Politics in Provincial New York, 1689–1761” (PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1935). 16 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 1630–1783 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 150–70; Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening, ed. C.C. Goen, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 151, 491–3; Richard Warch, “The Shepherd’s Tent: Education and Enthusiasm in the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 30 (1978): 177–98. 17 On Weiser, see Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, “Conrad Weiser: Mystic Diplomat,” Explorations in Early American Culture 4 (2000): 113–47. 18 Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 19 Ian K. Steele, “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives,” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 70–95, first two quotations at 72, remaining quotations at 76, 77, 83, and 85.

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appendix one Ian K. Steele’s Calendar of Scholarly Writing, 1966–2006

1966 “The Board of Trade, The Quakers, and Resumption of Colonial Charters, 1699–1702.” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter wmq) 3rd ser. 22 (1966): 596–616. 1967 Review of Toward Lexington, by John Shy. Canadian Journal of History (hereafter cjh) 2 (1967): 94–5. 1968 Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (xviii, 217 pp.). Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Review of British Historians and the West Indies, by Eric Williams, wmq 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 506–8. 1969 Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle for Canada, 1689–1760 (159 pp.). Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969. “Guerillas and Grenadiers.” cjh (Toronto) 4 (1969): 7–ll. 1971 Review of Empire and Interest, by Michael Kammen. wmq 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 496–8. 1972 Review of The East India Company Journals, ed. Michael Strachan and B. Penrose. cjh 7 (1972): 286–7. 1973 Review of No Peace beyond the Line, by Carl Bridenbaugh and R. Bridenbaugh. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (hereafter jich) 1 (1972–73): 391. Review of “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle, by James A. Henretta. Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 352–3. Review of Sugar and Slaves, by R.S. Dunn. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter pmhb) 97 (1973): 107–8.

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1974 “Time, Communications and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702.” Journal of American Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 1–21. “Eyre, William.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, 214–15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. “Forbes, John.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, 218–19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Review of Tides of Empire, by G.S. Graham. The History and Social Science Teacher (hereafter hsst) 10 (1974–75): 59. 1975 Review of Journal … of Nicholas Buckridge, ed. J.R. Jenson. cjh 10 (1975): 133–4. 1976 Review of The Politics of Command, by J.G. Rossie, and of Alexander McDougall and the American Revolution in New York, by Roger J. Champagne. hsst 12 (1976–77): 127–8. 1977 Atlantic Merchant-Apothecary: Letters of Joseph Cruttenden, 1710–1717 (xxv, 135 pp.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. “Instructing the Master of a Newfoundland Sack Ship, 1715.” Mariner’s Mirror 63 (1977): 191–3. “Integration and Disintegration of the British Atlantic to 1776: An Interpretation of Some Recent Literature.” hsst 12 (1977): 145–52. “A London Trader and the Atlantic Empire: Joseph Cruttenden, Apothecary, 1710 to 1717.” wmq 3rd ser. 34 (1977): 281–97. Review of The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815, by Paul Langford. The American Historical Review (hereafter ahr) 82 (1976–77): 963–4. Review of Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1920–1950, by Hugh Tinker. Canadian Book Review Annual, 1976 (1977): 327. 1978 Review of Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1800, by John Money. Canadian Book Review Annual, 1977 (1978): 246. 1979 “Moat Theories and the English Atlantic, 1675 to 1740.” In Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1978, 18–33. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1979. “Monckton, Robert.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, 540–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Review of Dugard of Rouen: French Trade to Canada and the West Indies, 1729– 1770, by Dale Miquelon. cjh 14 (1979): 470–2. 1980 “The Empire and Provincial Elites: An Interpretation of Some Recent Writings on the English Atlantic, 1675–1740.” jich 8 (1979–80): 2–32. Reprinted in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds, The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution, 2–32. London: Frank Cass, 1980.

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“Thin Red Lines: Governors of England’s Empire before 1681.” Reviews in American History 8, no. 3 (1980): 318–22. 1981 The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (xviii, 217 pp.). Wakefield, Yorkshire, uk: EP Microform, 1981. “Another Early America: Getting and Begetting in the Chesapeake.” The Canadian Review of American Studies (hereafter cras) 12 (1981–82): 313–22. Review of English America and the Restoration Monarchy of Charles II, by J.M. Sosin. pmhb 106 (1981): 493–4. 1982 Review of Distant Dominion: Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1579–1809, by Barry Gough. Canadian Book Review Annual, 1980 (1982): 182–3. Review of Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795, by J.A. Houlding. cjh 17 (1982): 545–7. 1983 “Finlay, Hugh.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, 314–19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Review of Eleven Exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution, ed. Phyllis R. Blakeley and John N. Grant. Canadian Book Review Annual, 1982 (1983): 53. 1984 Review of The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville, by Piers Mackesy. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 6, no. 2 (1984): 106–7. Review of Pursuit of Profit and Preferment in Colonial North America: John Bradstreet’s Quest, by William G. Godfrey. wmq 3rd ser. 41 (1984): 310–12. 1985 “Communicating an English Revolution to the Colonies, 1688–1689.” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 333–57. Review of Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800, by E. Ingram. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 7, no. 2 (1985): 85. Review of Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime, ed. Leonard Bluss and Femme Gaastra. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 7, no. 2 (1985): 36–7. Review of The Management of Monopoly: A Study of the English East India Company’s Conduct of Its Tea Trade, 1784–1833, by Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui. The Canadian Book Review Annual, 1984 (1985): 381. Review of Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800, by Peter Kriedte. cjh 20 (1985): 419–20. Review of The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615–1646: Eyewitness Accounts Sent by the Early Colonists to Sir Nathaniel Rich, edited by Vernon A. Ives. The Canadian Book Review Annual, 1984 (1985): 88. Review of Shetland Life and Trade, 1550–1914, by Hance D. Smith. cjh 20 (1985): 430–1.

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1986 The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (xiii, 400 pp.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Review of George Grenville: A Political Life, by Philip Lawson. wmq 3rd ser. 43 (1986): 148–50. Review of Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1650, by Kenneth R. Andrews. cjh 21 (1986): 246–7. 1987 Review of Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, by Robert C. Ritchie. cras 18 (1987): 300–1. Review of English America and Imperial Inconstancy: The Rise of Provincial Autonomy, 1696–1715, by J.M. Sosin. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter vmhb) 95 (1987): 114–15. Review of The New York Loyalists, by Philip Ranlet. cras 18 (1987): 578–9. Review of 1676: The End of American Independence, by Stephen Saunders Webb. Historian 49 (1987): 560–1. Review of Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn. cras 18 (1987): 576–8. 1988 Review of Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by David Eltis. Canadian Historical Review 59 (1988): 541–2. Review of The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, by John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard. jich 17 (1988–89): 109–11. Review of The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790, ed. Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert. Georgia Historical Quarterly 72 (1988): 731–3. Review of Louis XV’s Navy, 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration, by James Pritchard. cjh 23 (1988): 411–12. Review of Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788, by Jack P. Greene. ahr 93 (1988): 496–7. Review of South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd ed., by T.R.H. Davenport. Canadian Book Review Annual, 1987 (1988): 276–7. 1989 “Colonizers into Colonized.” cras 19 (1988): 353–8. “Governors or Generals? A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America.” wmq 3rd ser. 46 (1989): 304–14. “Origins of Boston’s Revolutionary Declaration of 18 April, 1689.” New England Quarterly 62 (1989): 75–81. Review of Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826, by Peggy K. Liss. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 9, no. 2 (1989): 132–3. Review of Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775, by A. Roger Ekirch. Journal of American History 76 (1989–90): 1302–3. Review of The Economy of British West Florida, 1763–1783, by Robin F.A. Fabel. ahr 94 (1988–89): 1474–5.

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Review of General John Burgoyne, by Richard J. Hargrove, Jr. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 9, no. 2 (1989): 107. Review of Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman, by Mary Lou Lustig. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 9, no. 2 (1989): 134. Review of Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, by Jean-Christophe Agnew. cras 19 (1988): 385–6. 1990 Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (xi, 250 pp.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. “Cooper and Clio: The sources for ‘A Narrative of 1757.’” cras 20 (1989): 121–35. Review of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750, by Marcus Rediker. Journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 128–9. Review of The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine. jich 18 (1990): 114–15. Review of The Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts: Selected Documents, 1689– 1692, ed. Robert E. Moody and Richard C. Simmons. New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 339–41. Review of Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600–1914, by Robert A. Naylor. cjh 25 (1990): 145–6. Review of Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, by Jack P. Greene. jich 18 (1990): 363–4. 1991 “Empire of Migrants and Consumers: Some Current Atlantic Approaches to the History of Colonial Virginia.” vmhb 99 (1991): 489–512. “Metropolitan Administration of the Colonies, 1696–1775.” In J.P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 9–16. Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1991. Review of Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. jich 19 (1991): 268–9. Review of The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400–1715, by G.V. Scammell. jich 19 (1991): 85–6. Review of The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution, by Philip Lawson. Albion 23 (1991): 321–2. Review of Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627– 1700, by Gary A. Puckrein. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography n.s. 11, no. 2 (1984): 178. Review of Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten. History of European Ideas 13 (1991): 475–6. 1992 “Suppressed Official British Report of the Siege and ‘Massacre’ at Fort William Henry, 1757.” Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 339–52.

500

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Review of England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 1585–1604: Essays from the AngloSpanish Conferences, London and Madrid, 1988, ed. M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado and Simon Adams. Northern Mariner 2 (1992): 79–80. Review of Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, by J.D. Davies. Northern Mariner 2 (1992): 61–2. Review of Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, by Robert M. Bliss. jich 20 (1992): 473–4. Review of Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland, by Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh. pmhb 117 (1992): 526–7. Review of Strangers in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan. Albion 24 (1992): 386–8. 1993 Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre.” Revised paperback edition (xi, 250 pp.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. “The European Contest for North America.” In Jacob E. Cooke, ed., Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, vol. 2, 271–88. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1993. “The ‘Massacre’ at Fort William Henry: A Modern View.” In Karen O. Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History, 515–27. Lexington, ma: D.C. Heath, 1993. Review of The Bias of Communications, by Harold A. Innis. Labour/ le travail 31 (Spring 1993): 402–3. Review of Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, by Jenny West. cjh 28 (1993): 94–6. Review of The Last Fight of the Revenge, by Peter Earle. Northern Mariner 3 (1993): 84–5. Review of The Last of the Mohicans, film produced and directed by Michael Mann for Twentieth Century Fox (1992). Journal of American History 80 (1993–94): 1179–81. Review of Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690– 1790, by Alison Gilbert Olson. Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1993): 701–4. Review of New Worlds and Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, by Anthony Grafton. Northern Mariner 3 (1993): 80–1. Review of A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, by Frances Harris. The Historian 56 (1993): 127–8. Review of Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615– 1753, by Jacob M. Price. ahr 99 (1993): 1247–8. Review of The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy. Northern Mariner 3 (1993): 88–9. Review of The Restoration Navy and English Foreign Trade, 1674–1688: A Study in the Peacetime Use of Sea Power, by Sari R. Hornstein. International Journal of Maritime History (hereafter ijmh) 12 (1992): 335–6. Review of Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800, by Alan L. Karras. vmhb 101 (1993): 550–1. Review of The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700, by David Harris Sacks. ahr 98 (1993): 156–7.

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501

1994 Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1513–1765 (282 pp.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Review of Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus to Abolition 1492–1888, ed. Alan L. Karras and J.R. McNeill. International History Review 16 (1994): 122–4. Review of Colonial America: A History, 1607–1760, by Richard Middleton. jich 22 (1994): 127. Review of The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800, by Jack P. Greene. jich 22 (1994): 347–8. Review of Seafaring in the Sixteenth Century: The Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, 1573, by Eugenio de Salazar, trans. John Frye. Northern Mariner 4 (1994): 89. 1995 “The British Parliament and the Atlantic Colonies to 1760: New Approaches to Enduring Questions.” Parliamentary History 14 (1995): 29–46. Reprinted in Philip Lawson, ed., Parliament and the Atlantic Empire, 29–46. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Review of Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century, by by Kenneth Morgan. Northern Mariner 5 (1995): 82–3. Review of European Warfare, 1660–1815, by Jeremy Black. Northern Mariner 5 (1995): 94–5. Review of Memoirs of the Late War in North America between England and France, by Pierre Pouchot, ed. B.L. Dunnigan. Ontario History 87 (1995): 211–12. Review of The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire, by Nancy Koehn. wmq 3rd ser. 52 (1995): 538–40. Review of The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740, by Charles E. Clark. Journal of American History 81 (1994–95): 1673–4. 1996 A Captive’s Right to Life? The Interaction of Amerindian, Colonial and European Values (22 pp.). The 14th Annual Brewster Lecture at East Carolina University. Greenville, nc: East Carolina University, [1996]. “Fort William Henry (N.Y.).” In Alan Gallay, ed., Colonial Wars of North America, 1512–1763: An Encyclopedia, 797–801. New York: Garland, 1996. Review of The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, by Colin G. Calloway. International History Review 18 (1996): 663–4. Review of Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785, by David Hancock. Northern Mariner 6 (1996): 85–6. Review of Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny. International History Review 18 (1996): 396–8. Review of Lord Churchill’s Coup: The Anglo-American Empire and the Glorious Revolution Reconsidered, by Stephen Saunders Webb. International History Review 18 (1996): 901–2. Review of Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History, by Jack P. Greene. pmhb 121 (1996): 131–2. Review of The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico, by Andrew L. Knaut. ahr 102 (1996): 1272.

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1997 “British America and the Caribbean, 1600–c.1783.” In Andrew Porter, ed., Royal Historical Society British Bibliographies, vol. 7, Imperial and Commonwealth, n.p. cd-rom. London: Royal Historical Society, 1997. Review of Overseas Trade and Traders: Essays on Some Commercial, Financial and Political Challenges Facing British Atlantic Merchants, 1660–1775, by Jacob M. Price. Northern Mariner 7 (1997): 110–11. Review of The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785, by Kathleen Wilson. jich 25 (1997): 325–6. 1998 “The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the First British Empire, 1689–1784.” In P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, 105–27. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives.” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 70–95. “Governors or Generals? A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America.” wmq 46 (1989): 304–14. Reprinted in Mark Burkholder, ed., Administrators of Empire, 213–23. An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450–1800, vol. 22. Aldershot, uk: Variorum, 1998. “Introduction.” In Olaf U. Janzen, ed., for the International Maritime Economic History Association, Merchant Organization and Maritime Trade Initiatives within the North Atlantic, 1660–1815, 1–13. St John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1998. “Surrendering Rites: Prisoners on Colonial North American Frontiers.” In Richard Connors, Clyve Jones, and Stephen Taylor, eds, Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, 137–57. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998. Review of The Atlantic Staple Trade, vol. 1, Commerce and Politics, and vol. 2, The Economics of Trade, ed. Susan Socolow. Northern Mariner 8 (1998): 108–9. Review of The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War, by D. Peter MacLeod. Canadian Historical Review (June 1998): 337–8. Review of Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800, by Eric Hinderaker. cjh 33 (1998): 129–31. Review of Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World, by John J. McCusker. cjh 33 (1998): 494–5. Review of Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800, by James Walvin. cjh 33 (1998): 343–4. Review of Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature, by Gordon M. Sayre. Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (1998): 410–11. 1999 The Human Tradition in Colonial America, edited with Nancy L. Rhoden (323 pp.). Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1999. “Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives” (1998). Reprinted in Louis Masur, ed., The Challenge of American History, 70–95. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

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“Susannah Johnson, Captive.” In Ian K. Steele and Nancy L. Rhoden, eds, The Human Tradition in Colonial America, 257–71. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1999. “Monckton, Robert.” In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds, American National Biography, vol. 15, 608–9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Review of Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians, by Harry Liebersohn. International History Review 21 (1999): 991–3. Review of Britain as a Military Power, 1688–1815, by Jeremy Black. jich 27 (1999): 133–4. Review of Empire, Society, and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, ed. Nicholas Canny et al. wmq 56 (1999): 198–201. 2000 The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, edited with Nancy L. Rhoden (368 pp.). Wilmington, de: Scholary Resources, 2000. “Narrative as Master: A Forum on Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War.” cjh 35, no. 3 (2000): 473–505. “Braddock, Edward,” “Braddock’s Defeat,” “French and Indian War,” “Imperial Wars,” “Louisbourg Siege (1745),” “Prisoners and Captives of War, Colonial,” and “Quebec, battle of.” In John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Review of Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs, 1600–1834, by Anthony Farrington, and of A Biographical Index of the East India Maritime Service Officers, 1600–1834, by Anthony Farrington. Northern Mariner 11 (2000): 70–1. Review of Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766, by Fred Anderson. wmq 3rd ser. 57 (2000): 864– 8. Review of Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585– 1685, by Michael Leroy Oberg. International History Review 22 (2000): 384–6. Review of The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation, by Pieter Emmer. ijmh 12 (2000): 245–6. Review of European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815, by Armstrong Starkey. Journal of Military History 64 (2000): 514–15. Review of From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680– 1760, by Ned C. Landsman. vmhb 107 (1999): 479–80. Review of The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America, by Patricia U. Bonomi. cjh 35 (2000): 375–7. Review of Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, by Alison Games. vmhb 108 (2000): 436–8. Review of The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695, by Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid. ahr 106 (2000): 204. 2001 “James John Talman, 1904–1993.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada 6th ser. 11 (2000): 153–6.

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Review of The British Isles and the War of American Independence, by Stephen Conway. Albion 33 (2001): 482–3. Review of The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415– 1980, by David B. Abernethy. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002): 455–6. Review of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. ijmh 13 (2001): 221–5. Review of Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau. cjh 36 (2001): 630–1. 2002 Review of The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan. cjh 37 (2002): 420–2. Review of The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660– 1720, by Perry Gauci. ijmh 14 (2002): 364–5. 2003 “The Colonial Wars: 1512–1774.” In James C. Bradford, ed., Oxford Atlas of American Military History, 8–13. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. “Foreword.” In John I. Cooper, James McGill of Montreal: Citizen of the Atlantic World, ed. James Woycke, xiii-xv. Ottawa: Borealis, 2003. Review of Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763, by Kenneth J. Banks. ijmh 15 (2003): 252–3. Review of Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast, by Guy Chet. Journal of Military History 67 (2003): 1277–8. Review of Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy. ahr 109 (2003): 480–1. 2004 “Where Is History Heading? A Review Essay.” cjh 39 (2004): 547–55. Review of The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery, by Carville Earle. ahr 110 (2004): 1219–20. Review of Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830, ed. Horst Pietschmann. International History Review 26 (2004): 616–18. Review of The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. ijmh 16 (2004): 402–3. Review of The Great Encounter: Native Peoples and European Settlers in the Americas, 1492–1800, by Jayme A. Sokolow. Hispanic American Historical Review 84 (2004): 520–1. Review of The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, by T.H. Breen. vmhb 112 (2004): 69–70. Review of The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699–1832, by Jerry Bannister. ijmh 16 (2004): 307–9. 2005 “When Worlds Collide: The Fate of Canadian and French Prisoners Taken at Fort Niagara, 1759.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études Canadiennes 39, no. 3 (2005): 9–39.

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“Fishing for Empire?” Review of Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century, by Peter E. Pope. ijmh 17 (2005): 272–7. Review of Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield, by Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney. cjh 40 (2005): 131–2. 2006 “The Shawnee and the English: Captives and War, 1753–1765.” In Daniel Barr, ed., The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850, 1–24. Kent, oh: Kent State University Press, 2006. “Shawnee Origins of Their Seven Years’ War.” Ethnohistory 53 (2006): 657–87. Review of The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis. ijmh 17, no. 2 (2006): 373–5. Review of The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination, ed. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula. ijmh 18, no. 1 (2006): 415–16. Review of The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War, by Jonathan R. Dull. International Historical Review 28 (2006): 599–600.

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appendix two Completed Graduate Theses Supervised by I.K. Steele, 1974–2006 1974 Russell, Peter E. “British Officers and Irregular War in Europe and America, 1740–1763.” ma. 1979 Calleya-Cortis, William. “Self and Commonwealth.” ma. 1981 Murison, Barbara. “William Blathwayt’s Empire.” PhD. 1983 Rosenkrantz, Otte A. “Soldiers and Merchants: An Interpretation of Nova Scotia Government, 1710–1758.” ma. 1986 Dutrizac, Desmond. “Conflict and Legitimacy on the Periphery: Social Aspects of the Maryland-Pennsylvania Boundary Dispute, 1680–1763.” PhD. 1987 Fraser, Adrian. “Rural Society in St. Vincent, 1860–1940.” PhD. 1987 Hay, Alexander T. “British Protestant Missionaries and India, 1813– 1870.” ma. 1989 Rhoden, Nancy. “Family and Landholding in Providence, Rhode Island.” ma. 1990 McFadden, Enid. “The Iroquois in the Seven Years’ War.” ma. 1990 Norton, David J. “Samson Occom: Puritanism and Traditional Mohegan Leadership in Eighteenth Century New England.” ma. 1991 Köster, Elizabeth J. “‘Operating from Bastard Territory’: Attitudes toward the Motherland and the Colonial Self in Four Australian and Canadian Novelists.” PhD. Co-supervisor. 1991 Lee, Lawrence. “Per Mare Per Terram? The Changing Roles of the British Marine Forces, 1664–1766.” ma. 1991 Leung, Michelle. “‘For Sundry and Weighty Reasons’: Colonial Promotion Literature and the First Generation of New England Immigrants.” ma. 1991 Rosner, Ian L. “The Quakers of Philadelphia, War and International Trade, 1739–1761.” ma. 1992 Carnduff, Brendan. “One Vision: Dundas, Wellesley and the Marathas, 1798–1805.” ma. 1993 Lorenz, Stacy. “‘To Do Justice to His Majesty, the Merchant and the Planter’: Governor William Gooch and Anglo-Virginia Politics, 1727– 1749.” ma.

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1993 Parmenter, Jon. “Pontiac’s War: Protecting Native Sovereignty in the Middle West, 1760–1766.” ma. 1996 Dunn, Kelly. “The Massachusetts Committees of Correspondence.” ma. 1996 Morrison, Sara. “English Forest Policy during the Interregnum, 1649– 1660.” ma. 1997 Watson, Michael. “Appropriating Empire: The British North American Vice-Admiralty Judges, 1697–1775.” PhD. 1998 Stanbridge, Karen. “British Catholic Policy in Eighteenth-Century Ireland and Quebec.” PhD. Co-supervisor. 2002 Kennedy, Neil. “Anglo-Bermudian Society in the Atlantic World, 1612– 1701.” PhD. 2003 Campbell, Alexander V. “Anvil of Empire: The Royal American Regiment, 1756–1775.” PhD. 2004 Morrison, Sara. “The Stuart Forests: From Venison Pie to Wooden Walls.” PhD. 2004 Norton, David J. “Rebellious Younger Brothers: Oneida Leadership and Diplomacy, 1750–1800.” PhD. 2006 Carleton, Craig J. “Ideology and Politics: The Deane-Lee Affair.” ma.

Index

Abolitionists, British: and British selfimage, 461–2; diversity of, 453; economic arguments of, 459–60; growing support for, 461–2; impact on America, 457–8; and imperial connection, 452, 455, 459; inspired by American Revolution, 454–5, 463; interest intensified in West Indies, 459; and legislation, 457, 458–9, 462; and millennialism, 462–4, 465–6; and religion, 453, 454, 462–4; on Sierra Leone, 460–1, 465; suspected of radicalism, 454; on US and slavery’s persistence, 464 absolutism, 37, 41, 43 Acadian refugees, 294 Acrelius, Israel, 397, 402 Adams, John, 392, 413, 432 Admiralty, British, 226, 286, 294 Africans, xxi, 379, 387 Aix-la-Chappelle, Treaty of, 194 Albany, 238, 239, 254–5, 258, 297 Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 235; on Albany-Canada fur trade, 246–7, 251–2; concern with French expansion, 239; criticism of their neutrality policy, 247, 259; criticized at Albany Congress, 262; Dutch background of, 239; historians and contemporaries on, 236, 238, 264, 486–7; interactions with

Haudenosaunee, 236, 237, 248–9, 257; manuscript records of, compared with Wraxall’s Abridgment, 236–7; profile of, 238–46, 253; recognition of Haudenosaunee neutrality, 248–9, 257, 258–9, 263; reconstituted and duties of, 261–2; relations with New York Assembly, 256–7, 258, 259, 260; replaced by and compared with Johnson, 260, 262; role in Mohawk land dispute and land patenting, 253–6; support for Anglo-American imperial objectives, 249–50 Albany Congress (1754), 255, 262, 263 Albany Fort, James Bay, 181, 182 Albemarle, Duke of, 40 Albion, R.G., 485 Alice Holt Forest, 144, 148 American Philosophical Society, 384 American Revolution, 410; changed parameters of British antislavery debate, 455–6, 462, 464–6; and Constitutional Convention, 458; historiography of, 477–8; impact on American antislavery, 452, 462; impact on British antislavery, 450– 66, 490; impact on British self-image, 452, 461–2, 465; nonimportation strategies of, and disruption to slave trade, 453, 454, 455, 465; as

510

Index

patriarchal rebellion, 413–14, 415– 17, 489–90; and refugee former slaves, 453; resumption of slave trade after, 457; teleology of abolition, 452, 463–4, 466; use of extra-parliamentary opposition in, 454; in Virginia, 414, 418, 426; in West Indies, 456 American Revolutionary War, 207, 209, 217, 220, 224, 228 Amerindians, 8; and British justice, 330–1; at Detroit, 316, 317, 318– 19, 328; and education in Bermuda 126; effect of improved British selfsufficiency on, 329; and imperial conflict/warfare, 11, 25–6, 27, 479–80, 481; market at Michilimackinac, 328; relations after Pontiac’s Rebellion, 330; relations with and provisioning of British army, 311–12, 314, 315, 316, 332–3; and Seven Years’ War, 23–4; trade for ammunition, 320–1, 332 Amherst, General Sir Jeffery, 296, 297, 481; on gunpowder trade with Amerindians, 321, 332; on provisioning Great Lakes forts, 310, 314, 326; and reimbursement of French, 322; on relations with Amerindians, 313, 328, 332; on traders and local suppliers, 315, 320 Anabaptists, 383–4 Anderson, Fred, xvii, 28 Andrews, Charles McLean, 9, 12, 13, 478–9; on empire and anachronism, 4; views compared to Atlantic history, xv-xvi, xvii Andros, Sir Edmund, 39, 40; and Maryland, 68; as New England governor, 43, 49, 64, 65; as New York governor, 238; as Virginia governor, 67, 71, 483 Anglicanism. See Church of England Anglo-Dutch War: first, 137, 139, 161; second, 139, 140, 141; third, 180; fourth, 225 Anglo-Spanish War, 219 Ann Arundel (later Annapolis), 68

Anne, Queen, 73–4, 76, 476 Anson, Admiral Lord, 213, 222, 223 antislavery, 450–66 architecture, 61, 122 Arlington, Secretary of State, 34 Armitage, David, xvi, 5, 38 army, English/British: 44th Regiment, 293; 50th and 51st Regiments, 289; 60th Regiment, see Royal American Regiment; as Atlantic economy participants, 295; compared to bound labour, 288; compared to civilian life, 287; compared to European armies, 286–7; logistical system in Great Lakes region, 311, 323–3, 327, 329; relations in Great Lakes region with Amerindians, French, and colonials, 311–13, 332–3; relations with traders, 315, 327–8; and royal will, 43–4; supplying its western garrisons, 315, 326–7, 428 Arnborg, Kathryn Carin, 376 Askin, John, 327–8 Atkins, Governor, 39, 47, 50 Atlantic, English: and Bermuda’s place in, 107–8, 124, 126–27; maritime trade in, 16–17, 118–20, 220, 222–5; military and civilian migration in, 285–6, 287–9; sea route to Hudson Bay, 176; sea route to North America, 220–1 Atlantic, French and Channel coasts: Basque Roads as exception, 211– 14; character of ports, 210–11, 216; compared to Mediterranean, 210; geography, 208, 210, 225; invincible Brest, 214 Atlantic history: and American exceptionalism, xiii-xiv, xvi, xix; and anglocentricism, xiv; as approach, paradigm, xvi-xviii; and colonial diversity, xvii, xviii; compared with imperial school and new social history, xv, xvii-xviii; as historians’ phrase, xx; and history of empire, xviii-xix, xx-xxi; and international

Index perspective, xix-xxi; origins of, xivxv, 6; relationship to frontier history, 479, 487; Steele’s impact on, 476–7, 479; as synthesis, xvi, xviii Austria, 286, 482 Aylmer, G.E., 33, 36, 37, 51, 52 Bacon’s Rebellion, 35, 38, 67, 74 Bahamas, 118 Bailyn, Bernard, xviii-xix, 4, 12, 478 Balfour, Captain Henry, 313, 317 Baltic, 137, 141, 161, 226 Bancroft, George, 24, 478, 479 Barbados, 39, 44, 47, 117, 128, 477, 479 Basque Roads, 211, 214, 221, 222 Basset, Commandant Henry, 326 Bassett, Captain Thomas, 295 Baugh, Daniel, 485–6 Beale, Elizabeth, 418 Beale, Judith (née Carter), 419, 422–3 Beale, Reuben, 422 Beer, George Louis, 478 Bellestre, François, 320, 329, 331 Bellomont, Earl of, Richard Coote, 72, 73 Benezet, Anthony, 451 Bere, Forest of, 152 Berkeley, George, dean of Londonderry, 126, 127 Bermuda, 46, 484–5; absence of indigenous people, 110–11, 113, 122; agricultural, intercolonial trade of, 118–19, 120; architecture of, 122; comparison and association with Virginia, 108, 113–14, 117, 118, 119, 120–1, 122, 123; environment of, 115–16; and images of, 126–7; lore of, 109, 113; maritime traffic through, 116–17, 123, 125, 126; mobility and emigration of its settlers, 117–18, 120; name appropriated, 114–15; named, 109; orientation and place in English Atlantic, 107–8, 119–20, 123–5, 126– 8; and origins of English Atlantic,

511

107–8, 122–3, 127–8; providence and colonization in, 113–14, 115, 117–18; reefs compared to New England shore, 111–12; reputation for shipwrecks, 110, 111, 112–13; and salvaging wreckage, 120; scholarship on, 127–8; Spanish, French, Dutch interest in, 109–10, 124; survey, maps of, 121–3 Bermúdez, Juan, 109 Beverley, Robert, 421–2 Bladen, Martin, 83 Blair, Rev. James, 70, 72, 73, 483 Blakiston, Governor John, 73 Blathwayt, William: admirer of Thomas Hobbes, 482; on empire, 33, 34, 37–9; and Francis Nicholson, 63, 64, 67, 70; ideas, 36–7; implementation of policy, 40–4; and John Locke, 482–3; and military, 42–4; plantations office influence, 47–9; his positions and patrons, 35–6; his “Reflections on a Paper Concerning America,” 37–9; rise to positions, 34–6; role in colonial governance, 41–2; significance of responsibilities, 51–2; as Tory, 476; views on colonial governors, 39–40; views on French administration, 37 Board of Trade (Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations): and colonial governors, 83; conveys land in Nova Scotia, 294; creation of, 474, 475; divides land in Prince Edward Island, 295; and royal authority in colonies, 68–9; Steele on, 5–6, 22, 475–6; on tobacco inspection, 85–6, 87, 88, 483 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 18, 19, 20, 26 Boscawen, Admiral, 221, 223 Boston, 217, 477 Boucher, Jonathan, 410–11, 412, 423, 434–5 Bouquet, Colonel Henry, 298, 314–15 Bowen, Huw, 9 Bradstreet, Colonel John, 296, 322, 323–4

512

Index

Braudel, Fernand, xviii Breen, T.H., xix, 478 Brehm, Lieutenant Dietrich, 299 Brest, 214, 216, 222, 223, 225, 226 Breton, 214 Brewer, John, 10 Bridgeman, William, 35, 51 Bridgewater, Earl of, John Egerton, 62, 70–1 Brothertown, 345, 348, 360–4, 488; compared to praying towns, 362–3; government of, 362–3 Brouwer, Jacob, 252 Brown, Kathleen M., 415 Bruce, Commandant Thomas, 323, 330 Brunius, Staffan, 393 Brussels, 428 Buchet, Christian, 221 Buell, Rev. Samuel, 351 Burnet, Governor William, 250, 251, 252 Bushman, Richard, xix Butler, Lieutenant John, 313, 316 Butler, Governor Nathaniel, 116, 119, 122–3 Butler, Walter, 254–5 Byng, Admiral John, 213 Byrd, Maria, 418 Byrd, William, 89 Calloway, Colin, his The World Turned Upside Down, 372, 374 Cammerhoff, Bishop, 400–1 Campbell, Alexander V., 487 Campbell, Captain Donald, 310, 314; on ammunition trade with Amerindians, 320–1; contracts for food, 318; on defence of forts, 321; on greenhouse, 326; on livestock, 327; on local French and Amerindian resources at Detroit, 316, 317, 319, 320, 324; on military supply inadequacies, 314, 315–16; on need for storehouse, 326; and Pontiac, 319; on quartering at Detroit, 331; on retrieving food from Niagara, 317 Campbell, Sergeant Moses, 291

Canajoharie, 255, 258, 260 Canasatego, 257 Cape Clear, Ireland, 208 Cape Finisterre, Spain, 208, 220 Cap Français, Haiti, 223 Carlisle, Earl of, 44 Carlos III, King, of Spain, 209 Carr, Lois Green, 478 Carson, Cary, 478 Cartagena, 93, 218, 227 Carter, Elizabeth, 418, 422 Carter, John, 418 Carter, Landon, 411, 417; on children’s marriages, 422–3; diary, 419; on education, 421; family, 418; opinions about, 421–2; as patriarch, 422, 423, 433; in politics, 419, 425, 433, 435; relations with son Robert Wormeley, 420–1, 490; slaves, servants of, 418, 423, 433, 434; wives and views of women, 418, 420, 433 Carter, Landon II, 418, 422 Carter, Landon III, 421 Carter, Maria, 418 Carter, Robert “King,” 418, 490 Carter, Robert Wormeley, 418, 420, 422 Carter, Susannah, 419 Carter, Winifred Beale, 420 Catawba, 249, 378 Catesby, Mark, 61 Catholics, 68, 383, 384, 391–2 Cayton, Andrew, xvii Cayuga, 256, 257 Cederheilm, Germund Ludvig, 394 Champlain, Samuel de, 109, 178 Charles I, King, 120 Charles II, King, 41 Charles XII, King, of Sweden, 374 charters and corporations, 45–8 Cherbourg, 210 Childs, J.C., 41 Child, Sir Josiah, 38 Chippewa, 330 Chouart, Médard, Sieur des Groseilliers, 178, 179

Index Christianity, evangelical: and antislavery, 451; and missionaries among Indians, 346, 349; Mohegan views on, 348; Occom’s conversion to, 349 Church of England (or Anglican): and Catholic pictorial tradition, 391–2, 394; colonial missions of, 391; cosmology, hierarchy of, 410; in England, 389; Francis Nicholson’s promotion of, 71, 483; and Samuel Hesselius, 392–3 Churchill, 181, 188–90, 191–2, 194. See also Prince of Wales Fort Churchill River, 189–90 Clarendon, Earl of, 40, 48 Clarke, Lieutenant Governor George, 256 Clarkson, Thomas, 455, 461, 462; his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 450–1 Claude, Comte de Forbin, 207 Claus, Captain Daniel, 293 Clausewitz, Carl von, 18–20, 26, 28, 482; compared to Jomini, 19–20; compared to Steele, 20 Clelland, Robert, 345–6, 347 Clinton, Governor George, 235, 257, 258, 259, 260–1, 486 coastal geography: of Caribbean, 217–18; of England, 216; English advantage over Dutch, 225; of English and French channels, 485–6; of France, 208, 210; French advantage over England, 225; French disadvantages on European side, 226; impact on English history, 227–8; of North America, 217, 227 Codrington, Colonel, 38 Coke, Sir Edward, 44 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 178 Colden, Cadwallader, 238, 247, 256 College of William and Mary, The, 66, 71, 421, 427 Collin, Rev. Nicholas, 384–6, 387, 388

513

Colonial British North American history, importance of, 4, 7–8 Colston, Lucy (née Carter), 419, 421, 422–3 Colston, William, 422 Compagnie du Nord, 179, 181 Compton, Bishop Henry, 70, 71, 73, 75 Connecticut Assembly: conflict with Mohegans over Ben Uncas III’s funeral, succession, 358; land and relations with Mohegan, 356–7; oversight of Indian affairs, 358–9; passes laws concerning Indians, 348–9; relations with Pequot, 356 Conpill, 149 Constitution of the United States, and slavery, 453, 458–9, 461, 462, 464, 465 Continental Congress, 425, 428, 432 Conway, Earl of, 35, 48 Cook, James, 226 Cooper, David, 457, 464 Cooper, James Fenimore, 23 Cooper, Thomas, 460–1 Copeland, Patrick, 124, 126 Corbin, Thomas, 153, 155–6 Cosby, Governor William, 255 Covenant Chain alliance: Albany Commissioners’ commitment to, 257; broken, 258; corporate memory of, 237; diplomacy and maintenance of, 239, 250, 262, 264; and Haudenosaunee neutrality, 261; and 1753 conference, 253; terms of, 255, 263 Coventry, Lieutenant George, 296 Coventry, Lord Thomas, 137 Coventry, Sir Henry, 47 Cox, John, 153–4 Crane, Elaine Foreman, 484–5 Crashaw, William, 108, 117, 129 Crawford, Michael, 478 Cree, 175, 185 Cresswell, Nicholas, 417 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John, 127 Croghan, George, 315, 322

514

Index

Crown Point, 291 Cruttenden, Joseph, 7 Culpepper, Lord, 40 Dartmouth College, 488 D’Avenant, Charles, 37 Davenport, James, 488 Davis, Captain Joseph, 186 Davis, David Brion, 461 Dean Forest Act (1668), 144–5; compared with New Forest Act, 146–7; impact of, 157, 159. See also Forest of Dean Declaration of Independence, 452, 457 Dee, John, 110 deer, 144, 146–7, 157 Defoe, Daniel, 151–2 De Fonte, Admiral Bartolomé, 193 DeLancey, Governor, 255 Delaware (colony), 374 Delaware (Lenni-Lenape): chiefs of, 372, 374, 378, 401; connection to Mohegan, 348; relations with Moravians, 402; relations with Penns, Iroquois, 396 De Peyster, Mayor Johannes, 254 DesBarres, Lieutenant Joseph F.W., 292, 294; his Atlantic Neptune, 294 Detroit, 299, 481. See also Fort Detroit D’Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne, 181 Dieskau, Baron de, Jean Armand, 480 disease and naval expeditions, 221 Dissenters and antislavery, 454, 462, 464 Dobbs, Arthur, 191, 193; his Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, 193 Dolben, Sir William, and abolition act, 453, 457, 462 Dongan, Governor Thomas, 238, 254 Dove, Michael, 485 Downing, Sir George, 51 Drescher, Seymour, 459 Dubois de la Motte, Admiral, 221, 223 Duguay-Trouin, René, 207 Duncan, Captain John, 296

Dunkirk, 210, 225 Dunmore, Lord: and his Proclamation of 1775, 414 Dunn, Randy, 483 Dunn, Richard S., 41 Dutch, 34; interest in Albany, 239–40; interest in Bermuda, 109, 124; Reformed Church, in Albany, 239; trade with France and English interception, 226. See also Netherlands Dutton, Governor, 39, 48 East India Company, 69, 124, 225 Eburne, Richard, 116, 117 education: in Bermuda, 126; European schools for Indians, 347, 348, 349; and free schools in Maryland, 68; Occom’s promotion of, 359– 60; in Virginia, 61, 65, 66 Edwards, Jonathan, 350, 354, 488 Egmont, Earl of, John Perceval, 295 Egnal, Marc, 9 Eliot, John, 349 Elliott, J.H., xx Empire, British: compared to France, Spain, 8; consumer revolution in, 478; contribution of maps to, 121– 3, 182–3; and domestic political structure, 59–60; and Great Awakening, 478; historiography of formation, 5; integration of, 478; and law, 44–6; meaning/character of, 12, 13; mercantile definition of, 60; migration in, 478; and military, 43–4, 60; and New England, 482; oceanic vs territorial character of, 9, 177–8; and peripheries, 8, 9; plantations administration in, 49– 50; professionalism in civil service of, 33, 51; relationship to American Revolution, 13–14; relationship of Bermuda to, 123–4, 125, 126; running of, 33; and war, 10, 11 empires: comparative, xix, xix, 8, 12, 14, 25–6; and newspapers, 477 English Channel and coasts, 216, 220, 228

Index English Harbour, Antigua, 218 Enlightenment, 478; and antislavery, 451; and warfare, 480, 481 Etherington, George, 318 Evelyn, John, 33, 35, 51, 216; on forests, 136, 137, 138, 139, 158; his Sylva, 138, 159–60 Falconer, Captain Thomas, 293 family, history of the: and American Revolution, 415, 418, 435; and childrearing, 415–17, 434–5; and companionate marriage, 415, 416; in early republic, 416–17; and political history, 415. See also patriarchy Fiennes, Celia, 146, 151 Fiering, Norman, 478 Filmer, Robert, his Patriarcha, 410–11 Fleischer, Roland, 376 Fletcher, Phineas, 114 Florida, 481 Folkarne, Dalarna, Sweden, 374, 380 Forest of Dean: under Charles II, 138, 141, 142, 143–4; competing claims in, 159; Defoe on resources in, 151– 2; disafforestation of, 138; effect of storm (1662), 136–7; enclosures in, 157; naval shipbuilding in, 149–52; officers’ report of (1680), 145–6; Protectorate policy for, 139, 143–4, 144–5; royal deer in, 144, 159; survey of woods in, 137. See also Dean Forest Act (1668) forest policy, 138; of Charles II, 139– 40, 142–3; and conservation, preservation (or protection), management, 138, 139, 140, 160–61; ecology and local economy, 141, 148, 155–6; natural regeneration, 154–5; and traditional woodland practice, forest law, 155; use and common rights, 158–9; of William III, 143, 146–7 forests, English royal, 137, 485; and naval supply, 141, 144, 147; significance compared to Baltic and private forests, 141, 147. See

515

also Forest of Dean, New Forest, Sherwood Forest Fort des Miamis, 310, 313, 314; shortage of provisions, 315, 317– 18; supplied by Detroit, 318 Fort Detroit: defences of, 329; during Pontiac’s War, 319, 322; gardening at, 326; housing at, 329, 331–2; livestock at, 327; local resources at, 317; provisions (after mid-1760s), 324, 325, 326; provisions (early 1760s), 310, 316, 318; and Royal American Regiment, 313; traders’ supply of, 328 Fort Edward Augustus, 291, 310, 313, 317, 480; relations with Amerindians, 320 Fort Erie, 322, 324, 325, 327 Fort Michilimackinac: Amerindian trade, supplies at, 311, 312, 315; British troops deployed to, 313; defences of, 329; dependent on lake travel, 313; fishing at, 311, 326; gardening at, 326–7; provisions of (early 1760s), 310; provisions shortage at (after mid-1760s), 323– 4, 325, 326; reestablished, 322; relations with French at, 320, 322; and Royal American Regiment, 317; storehouse of, 326; supplies at, 318; traders at, 327–8 Fort Ouiatenon, 310, 311, 313, 314, 317; defences, 321; dependence on Amerindians, French, and traders, 318, 320 Fort Pitt, 316, 481 Fort St Joseph, 310, 313, 317; difficulties supplying, 318; lacks provisions, 319 Fort Sandusky, 311 Fort Sinclair, 322 Fort Stanwix, Treaty of, 363 Fort William Henry, and “massacre,” 11, 23–4, 479–80, 481 Fowler, David, 347, 348 Fowler, John, Jonathan, and Jonathan, Jr, 187

516

Index

Fowler, Mary, 347 Fox, Sir Stephen, 51 France, 93–4, 428, 452, 456, 476 Francklin, Michael, 293 Franklin, Benjamin, 379, 386–7 Frégault, Guy, 24 French: Atlantic and Channel coasts and ports, 208, 210–11, 216, 225; attack forts at Hudson Bay, 192; and/or Bourbon competition, trade in North America, 184–6, 192, 193, 195–6; colonial policy, 37; disruption of Hudson’s Bay Company’s regular voyages, 180–1, 185; and Hudson Bay claims, 175– 6, 178–9, 181, 183; interest in Bermuda 109, 110, 124; in West Indies, 219, 222, 227, 228 French Revolution, 410, 452; and Napoleonic Wars, 19–20 French settlers: at Detroit, 310, 317, 318–19, 325, 331; impact of improved British self-sufficiency on relations with, 329, 331; and land ownership within forts, 320, 331; and quartering of British troops, 320; relations with Amerindians and Pontiac’s War, 322, 331; relations with British army, 311–13, 321–22, 332–3; selling food, 314, 315–16, 325 fur trade, 175–6, 178, 196; between Canada and Albany, 239, 246–7; and efforts to end, 250, 251–2; and Royal American Regiment, 295–6, 297, 298 Furzer, Daniel, 136–7, 138, 145, 149 Gage, General Thomas: complaints about lack of Crown land in fort, 320; on exchange of French land and quitrents within Fort Detroit, 331–2; impractical preference for king’s provisions, 313; on likelihood of Native conflict after Pontiac’s War, 329–30; on military boats, 323, 330; on military vs local

provisioning, 324, 325–6, 327; on spoilage and food unfit for consumption, 324–5; on traders, 327 Gagnef parish, 398 garrison government, 3, 10, 41 George II, King, 286, 289 George III, King, and slavery, 452, 462 Germain, Lord George, 209 Germans, xxi, 378, 379, 386–7; Palatine, 255–6 Germany, 285, 286 Getchie, Lydia, 389, 390, 397 Gibraltar, 210, 220, 225, 226 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 110 Gillam, Zachariah, 179 Gipson, Lawrence Henry, 24; his The British Empire before the American Revolution, 479 Gladwin, Major Henry, 318–19, 326 Glasgow, 451, 453 Glasier, Captain Beamsley, 293 Gloria Dei, Philadelphia, 384, 399 Glorious Revolution, 34, 36, 42; in New England, 65 Gnadenhutten, 402 Godolphin, Sidney, 51, 74–5 Gooch, Governor William: and Cartagena campaign, 92–3; characterized by historians, 81–2; on colonial defence, 91–2, 93–4, 95; concern with empire, 94–6; limited control of patronage, 88, 89–90; patronage power vs policy of, 90, 96; his patrons, 82–3; his plan compared to Spotswood’s plan, 88–9, 90; relations with Assembly, 91, 93–4; and tobacco inspection, 84–8, 94–5, 484 Gooch, Thomas, 83 Gordon, Lord Adam, 247 Gorrell, Ensign James, 313, 319, 320 governors, colonial, 81–2; and Board of Trade, 83; and concern with empire, 94–5; and extension of royal authority, 71–2; and relations with British Empire, 82, 95–6 Graham, Gerald, 6 Great Awakening, 350, 478

Index Great Lakes: boats, schooners on, 313, 322–3, 330; navigation of, 310, 313–14 Greene, Jack P., 12, 41, 81, 85 Grenville, Sir Robert, 110 Guilford, Lord Keeper, 44, 48 Gwyn, Francis, 46–7 Gyllenborg, Carl, 393, 394 Haffenden, Philip S., 41, 46 Hakluyt, Richard, 110, 113 Haldimand, Colonel Frederick, 293 Hale, Sir Matthew, 44, 45 Halifax, 217, 227 Halifax, Lord, 48 Hall, Fayrer, 126 Hamilton, Michelle A., 487 Hancock, David, xix-xx, xxi, 7 Harbord, Charles, 143 Hardwicke, Lord, 216–17 Harley, Robert, 72 Harrington, 36–7 Haudenosaunee Confederacy: on Albany-Canada fur trade, 251–2; and Brouwer murder, 252–3; bypassed by William Johnson, 263; culture, condolence ceremonies, 249; diplomatic neutrality of, 247–8, 250, 253, 257–8, 260–1, 262; policies of, 486–7; relations with Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 235– 64, 247, 250, 263–4; relations with Laurentian Haudenosaunee, 257, 258–9; relations with settlers, 237– 8, 261; vitality of, 263 Havana, Cuba, 217, 218, 219, 227 Hawke, Sir Edward, 212, 213, 214, 222 Hayes River, 185–6 Hemphill, John M., 84 Henry, Patrick, 412, 419 Hesselius, Andreas: compared with Gustavus, 388; defended Samuel against Svedberg, 399; exile in Pennsylvania, 396–7; fascination with and opposition to Christianizing Indians, 397; marriage, 397; as priest, 374, 382; relations with Svedberg, 396–7,

517

398; return to Sweden, 398; ridiculed by Acrelius, 397; and Swedish Lutheran Church in America, 382, 391 Hesselius, Gustavus: ambition of, 389–90; Anglican commission and membership, 391–2; art historians on, 376; and Benjamin Franklin, 386–7; biographical sketch, 374; compared with Rev. Nicholas Collin, 384–6; and ethnic, religious pluralism, 489; as freelance artist and portraitist of men, 388, 390; influenced by brother Andreas, 397; influenced by brother Samuel, 399; interest in commission to paint Delaware chiefs, 390, 394, 399; and Joseph Martin, 387–8; journey of toleration, 396, 401–2; lack of personal papers, 376; letter to mother, 376–7, 388–90, 397; marriage to Calvinist, 388–9; Moravian contact and connection, 399– 400; Moravian contact and connection denied by Acrelius, 402; as naturalized British citizen, 392, 394; opinion of Indians, 377–8; his painter’s eye, 390; his painting of the Crucifixion, 392; his painting of the Crucifixion as Moravian image, 401; surviving paintings, 375– 6, 390; views on Pennsylvanians and diversity, 382–3, 384 Hesselius, Johan, 393 Hesselius, John, 374 Hesselius, Peter, 397 Hesselius, Samuel, 378, 388, 395; his chest of curiosities, 393–4, 395; conflict with Bishop Svedberg, 399; influence on Gustavus, 393, 394; as preacher in Anglican church in Pennsylvania, 392–3; reputation in America, 393; return to Sweden, 393, 395; supported by Lutherans and Anglicans, 399 Highland volunteers, 285 Hillsborough, Earl of, 478

518

Index

Hispaniola, 121 Hobbes, Thomas, 36, 45, 482–3 Holland, Captain Samuel, 292, 295 Holland Regiment, 62 Holmes, Ensign Robert, 298 Holy Roman Empire, 286, 289 Hood, John, 174, 176, 196 Hoosick, 235–6 House of Burgesses: elections, 419, 424; and Francis Nicholson, 483; and Landon Carter, 419; and Lee family, 424, 425; and military policy, 91–2, 93–4; opinions on tobacco inspection, 87–8, 484; reaction to Spotswood’s plan, 89 Howard, Captain William, 322, 323, 324, 326, 328 Howe, Admiral Richard, 209, 211, 212 Hudson Bay, 174, 175, 183, 186, 188 Hudson’s Bay, 185–6 Hudson’s Bay Company: bay-side, maritime, in-land strategies, 175–6, 177, 195–7; charter, 178; critics of, 191–2, 195, 196; English claims, 175, 179; fort building and defence, 189–92; French assaults on posts of, 176, 179, 181–2; and French claims to, 175–6, 178–9, 181–2, 183–4; French impact on, 485; fur market monopoly of, 175; in-house maps and charts, 182–3; and international competition, 177–8, 193–6; meeting (in 1769), 174; parliamentary inquiry about, 192; and Royal Navy’s limited assistance to, 181–2; sailing route, 179– 80; sailing schedule, 180–1, 186; ships captains’ tenure, salaries, experience, 186–8, 485; shipwrecks, 185–6; and Treaty of Utrecht, 183– 4, 185 Hudson Strait, 176, 178, 180, 182, 186, 188 Hughes, Lewis, 129 Hutchinson, Governor Thomas, 247, 293

ice, variety of sea, 187 Imperial school, xiv, xvii, 478–9, 482; on Revolution, 479 Indians. See Amerindians Ingelsby, Colonel Richard, 70 Inuit, 189 Ireland, 51, 123, 225, 285, 477; and Irish, xxi, 379 Iroquois, 378, 396, 397, 486–7. See also Haudenosaunee Confederacy Isaac, Rhys, 420, 421, 433 Isham, James, and Anthony Henday, 195 Isle d’Aix, 212, 214 Ismael, Emperor Muley, 63 Jacobinism, 452, 455 Jacobsen, Gertrude, 34, 37 Jamaica: and Albemarle, 40; and American Regiment in War of Jenkins’ Ear, 93; and British army, 44; and Governor Philip Howard, 38; newspaper in, 477; Port Royal harbour, 218; and Sir Thomas Lynch, 39; and sugar revolution, 479 James Bay, 175, 179 James II, King, 41, 42, 45; colonial policy, 49; on navy supply, 140 Jamestown, 113–14, 116, 117, 119, 123 Jamet, Lieutenant John, 313, 318 Jeaffreson, Christopher, 52 Jefferson, Thomas, 451, 489 Jenkins, Lieutenant Edward, 317, 318, 320 Jenkins, Sir Leoline, 48 Jewett, Rev., 358 Johnson, Joseph, 353 Johnson, Richard R., xv, 34; his Adjustment to Empire, 482 Johnson, Samuel, 8, 453 Johnson, Sir Nathaniel, 43 Johnson, Sir William: at Albany Congress, 262; on Amerindian trade with western garrisons, 315; criticism of Albany Dutch, 247, 249;

Index Haudenosaunee relations with, 238, 486–7; land speculation of, 256; management of Indian relations, 263; refashioned Covenant Chain, 263; relations with Theyanoguin, 261; replaced commissioners, 259–60; and Seneca concerns, 297; and treaty (1760), 322 Jomini, Henri, 19–20, 482 Joncaire, Louis-Thomas Chabert de, 253 Kahnawake, 246, 257, 258, 262 Kalm, Peter, 247 Katz, Stanley Nider, 90 Keegan, John, 19; his The Price of Admiralty, 208 Kellow, Margaret, 490–1 Kennedy, Archibald, 238 Kennedy, Neil, 484 Kindiacko, 252–3 King George, 174 King George’s War, 257, 258 King William’s War, 181, 239 Kirke, Governor Percy, 63, 64 Kirkland, Rev. Samuel, 345 Knight, James, 190 La Pérouse, Comte de, 192 laissez-faire, 459–60 Lake Champlain, 290, 291 Lake George, 480 Lake St Clair: sand bar and navigation, 314, 323 land grants for veterans, 289–91, 300; and Royal Proclamation (7 October 1763), 289, 290, 292; sale of, 290 Landsman, Ned, 478 Lapowinska: as Delaware chief, 372; Hesselius’s painting of, 373, 377, 394, 399, 400, 401; portrait of, 373; relations with Penns, 395–6 Laurentian Haudenosaunee: and Albany fur trade, 246, 251; delegates at Albany, 250, 252; Mohawks

519

threaten to join, 255; and neutrality, 248, 257, 258–9, 262; relations with Haudenosaunee and Albany Commissioners, 251–2 law and empire, 44–6 Leach, Douglas, 60 Leake, Robert, 314 Lee, Anne (née Aylett), 425 Lee, Anne (Gaskins Pinckard), 425 Lee, Arthur, 424, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433 Lee, Hannah (née Ludwell, R.H. Lee’s mother), 424 Lee, Hannah (R.H. Lee’s daughter), 425 Lee, Hannah (R.H. Lee’s sister), 433 Lee, Ludwell, 425, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431–2 Lee, Mary, 425 Lee, Philip, 424–5, 430 Lee, Richard Henry, 411, 417; on children’s education, 427–8, 431– 2; compared to Landon Carter, 425, 426, 427, 432, 433; family interests, 423–4, 425; finances of, 427, 428–9, 430; parents of, 424; as patriarch, 427, 433, 434; in politics, 425–6, 429, 432–3, 433, 435; on popularity, 425–6; relations with children, 426–7, 428–9, 490; siblings of, 424, 425; slaves, tenants of, 426, 433; wives and views on women, 425, 433–4 Lee, Thomas (R.H. Lee’s brother), 425 Lee, Thomas (R.H. Lee’s father), 424 Lee, Thomas (R.H. Lee’s son), 425, 427, 428–9, 430, 431–2, 434, 435 Lee, William, 424, 427, 428, 429, 431, 432 Leeward Islands, 35, 37, 39, 44 Leisler’s revolt, 483 Levy and Solomon Company, 312, 315 Lisbon, 220 Livingston, Philip, 254, 255 Livingston, Robert, 238

520

Index

Lloyd, Sir Philip, 46–7 Locke, John: influence on Virginia, New York, 476, 483; on political and parental authority, 411, 412, 413; and recoinage, 475; as Whig spokesman, 476; and William Andros, 71; and William Blathwayt, 36 Locke, Matthew, 35, 41 Lockridge, Kenneth A., 488–9 Logan, James, 390 London, 430, 477; dockyards, 137, 141, 148, 154 London Abolition Committee, 458, 460 Lords of Trade: colonial correspondence to, 42; and Edward Randolph, 47; impact on Atlantic history, 476–7, 478; origins and later loss of effectiveness, 474; reorganization and expansion of plantation business, 34–5; supervision of colonial laws, finance, 50; and William Blathwayt, 34–5, 42, 52 Loudoun, fourth Earl of, John Campbell, 285 Louis XIV, King, 37, 62, 65, 207, 228, 482 Louisbourg: British navy at, 214; French fleet and interception at, 223; French fortifications at, 216– 17; and Royal American Regiment, 292; and seaborne attack, 190; sieges (in 1757, 1758), 218, 221, 481 Louvois, 37 Lund, 393, 394 Lutherans: on Calvinists, 389; history in sixteenth century, 383; in Pennsylvania, 378, 391; on pictorial tradition, 391–2; reaction to Samuel Hesselius, 392–3; as religion of print, 391; on religious unity, 384, 389 Lydney royal dockyard, 137, 149 Lynch, Sir Thomas, 39, 40, 45, 50, 51 McDonnell, Michael, 415

McDougal, George, 327 Machiavelli, 36 Mackay, Lieutenant Samuel, 295 Madeira, 220, 221 Maier, Pauline, 477 Marlborough, Baron, 74–5, 83 Marlborough-Godolphin ministry, 74–5 Martin, Private Joseph, 387–8 Martinique, 223 Maryland, 374, 378, 392 Mason, George, 412 Mason, Major John, 356–7, 358 Mason, Robert, 46 Massachusetts, 459. See also New England, Dominion of Mather, Cotton, 386 Mather, Increase, 52, 386 Maurepas, Comte de, 184, 190, 219 May, Henry, 110–11 Mayhew, Experience, 349 Mediterranean, 210, 225 Mercer, George, 426 Middle Passage, 456, 457 Middleton, Christopher, 188, 190, 193 migration and Atlantic world, 285, 289; during wartime, 286; military migration compared to civilian, 287–8 military history: and canonical mode, 19; and narrative, 19–20, 27–8. See also warfare Millar, John, 451 millennialism and antislavery, 462–4, 465–6 Minorca, 210, 213, 219 Mississippi River, 227 Mohawk Flatts (or Tiononderoge), 254–5, 258 Mohawks: and German tenants, 255– 6; of Kahnawake, 257; and land dispute, 253–6; relations with Johnson, 238, 260; and Theyanoguin, 235–6; of Tiononderoge, 258 Mohegan, 346, 347; avoidance of Christianity and European values,

Index 348; Connecticut Assembly’s claims of authority over, 358; customs of naming, marriages, funerals, 361– 2; daily life and beliefs, 348; forbid missionaries, 349; impact of end of Uncas’s line on, 357–8; land disputes in, 357–9; relations with Connecticut colonists, 348–9; sachem role and legacy of Uncas, 356, 357– 8; shamen, 346, 349, 350, 353, 361, 362; songs and music, 354; spirituality, 350; tribal council, 346, 357 Mohegan-Pequot war, 348, 349, 356 Moll, Hermann: his “A New Map of North America,” 182 Monmouth Rebellion, 63, 64 Montauk, 347, 348, 355, 359, 488 Montcalm, Marquis de, Louis Joseph, 480, 481 Montgomerie, Governor John, 252, 253 Moore, Governor Henry, 290 Moravians, 378; connection with Delaware, 402; controversial beliefs and Pennsylvanian, Lutheran, Calvinist reaction to, 400; interaction of Gustavus Hesselius with, 399–400; Israel Acrelius opposes, 402; as missionaries to non-Europeans, 400; relations with Lutherans, 400; on slavery, tolerance, racial justice, 399–400 Morris, Charles, 293 Morrison, Sara, 485 Morton, Richard L., 81 Muldoon, James, 12 Munford, Robert, 415, 435; his The Candidates, 414–15; his The Patriots, 415 Murison, Barbara, 482 Murray, Major-General James, 295 Murrin, John, 10, 13 Naesman, Gabriel, 399 Namier, Sir Lewis, 5, 59–60 Nantes, 428, 429, 431 Naples, 209

521

Napoleon, compared to Nelson, 208–9 Navigation Acts, 38, 50, 69, 125 navigation tools, oceanic, 187–8 Navy Board, 138, 141, 153–4 navy, French, 208, 227–8; compared to British, 207, 219; and overseas territories, 184 Navy, Royal, 286; attack on Brest, 214; attack on Havana, 218–19; attack on St Malo, Cherbourg, 210– 11; and Basque Roads, Rochefort expeditions, 211–214; in Caribbean and American seaboard, 219; costs of timber transportation for, 149; and disease, 221; and Hudson Bay region, 181–2; prime naval strategies, goals of, 184, 206–7, 208, 228; shipbuilding and reliance on royal forests for, 137, 139, 140, 141, 148; Stuart, Interregnum, and Restoration navies compared, 140; supremacy of, 486 Needwood Forest, Staffordshire, 143 Netherlands, 475. See also Dutch New England, Dominion of, 39, 49; formation, 64 New Forest, 140, 141, 143; compared to Forest of Dean, 147, 157; condition in 1660s, 142; plantation enclosure in, 157–58; surveys of 1608 and 1707 compared, 158 New Forest Act (1698), 146–7, 157–8 New France, 480; and Haudenosaunee relations, 253, 257; trade with Albany, 246, 247 New Hampshire land grants, 289 New Jersey, 374, 378 new social history, xiv, xv, xvii-xviii New Stockbridge, 360, 364 New York, 39, 44, 477, 479; Assembly of, 256–7, 258, 259, 260, 261; and Brothertown, 364; land claims and patents to Haudenosaunee land in, 253–4; land grants in, 289, 290–1; port of, 217, 220 Newcastle, Duke of, 83, 90, 91, 213 newspapers and communications, 477

522

Index

Newton, Sir Isaac, 475 Niagara Fort and settlement, 296, 298–9, 313, 317, 481; criticism of, 296–7 Nicholson, Sir Francis: as diplomatic courier, 63; dismissed as Virginia governor, 74–5; as governor, 60– 1; as Maryland governor, 68–71; military experience, 62–4, 65; in New England, 64–5; opposes piracy, 69–70; other career assignments, 483; and patronage, 61, 64, 67, 71; as philanthropist, 61; reaction to Queen Anne’s accession, 73–4; his royal Instructions, 483; supporter of Church of England, 66, 71; in Virginia, 65–7; as Virginia governor, 70–4; on Virginia militia and elite, 74; and William Blathwayt, 63, 64, 67, 70; as youth, 61–2 Nickolls, Robert, 459, 462 Niedersachsen, 286, 287 Nordberg, Lieutenant John, 293 North, Roger, 44 Northwest passage: search for, 193 Norton, David, 488 “Nor-west Men,” 174, 176, 196 Norwood, Richard, 121, 122 Nott, Edward, 74 Nottingham, Earl of, Daniel Finch, 67 Nova Scotia, 221, 289, 292–4 oak forests, 142, 145, 153, 156 O’Brien, Susan, 478 Occom, Joshua, 357 Occom, Samson: on alcohol, 347, 353; at Brothertown, 360–4; conversion of, 349; death of, 345, 348; diary, 354, 361–2; family of, 347, 357; as fundraiser, 347, 361; historians on, 346; as intermediary, 355–6; as itinerant, 360; on land disputes, 357–9, 362–4; life of, 347–8; on Mohegans, 348, 354–5; music of, 354, 355, 359, 488;

oratorical skills, 354; on pride, 353–4; relations with Connecticut Assembly, 358–9; on revivalism and sacraments, rituals, 352, 361–2; as sachem, 356, 358–60, 362, 363, 364, 488; sermon to Moses Paul, 347, 351, 352, 355, 356; on shamanism, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 488; travel to Britain, 347, 352; at Wheelock’s school, 350, 352 Occom, Sarah, 357 Ogilvie, Rev. John, 293 Oldmixon, John, 125–6, 127; his The British Empire in America, 182 Olson, Alison Gilbert, 81 Oneida: land grant to Christian Indians, 363, 488; relations with Albany Commissioners, 256, 257; and Samson Occom, 345, 347, 359, 363, 488 Onondaga, 252–3, 256, 257 Orkney, Earl of, George Hamilton, 75 Osgood, Herbert Levi, 478 Oswego, 253, 256, 257, 480, 481 Oweneco, 356 Pagden, Anthony, 12 Page, John, 421 Paine, Thomas, 451, 453 Paley, William, 463 Paris, 429, 431, 477; and French property titles, 487; Treaty (or Peace) of (1763), 481; Treaty of (1783), 455, 458, 464 Parkman, Francis, 21–2, 24, 27, 481, 482 Parliament: concern over woods, timber, 142–3, 144, 156; inquiry of Hudson’s Bay Company (1749), 192 Parmenter, Jon, 486–7 patriarchy: and American Revolution, 416–17, 489–90; in early republic, 434–5; historians on, 411, 413, 414, 415–17, 433; impact of demography on, 412, 415–16, 417; and non-elite, 414; and paternalism in

Index mid-eighteenth century, 489; and slaves, 413–14; in Virginia, 413–14, 415–16; and women, 413. See also family, history of the patronage, 34–6, 40; and British government, 59; and colonial governorships, 51, 60; Duke of Newcastle’s control of, 90; and Francis Nicholson, 71, 74–6; and William Gooch, 82, 88, 89–90, 96 Paul, Moses, 347, 351, 352, 355, 356, 362 Paulet, Charles, 61, 62, 65 Paulus, 236, 263 Penn family, 374, 378, 379, 394, 395–6 Penn, William, 69–70 Pennsylvania, 285, 288; and gradual emancipation, 455, 459; as new model society, 378; opinions of Hesselius, Collin, and Franklin on, 384–7; religious freedom and proprietary government of, 379; servant and slave labour force in, 379 Pepys, Samuel, 33, 51; on English coasts, 216, 227; on forests, 136, 137, 138, 145, 149, 156, 160 Pequot, 348, 349, 356 Perry, Micajah, 86 Petty, Sir William, 36 Pfister, Lieutenant Francis, 298–9 Philadelphia, 217, 374, 392, 477 piracy, 68–70, 73, 219, 295 Pitt, William, 211, 213, 219; and slavery, 457 Plumb, J.H., 59 Plymouth, 215, 222 Pocahontas, 117 Pontiac’s Rebellion (Uprising, War), 481, 487; Amherst policy fostered, 321; British battalions in, 285; and changes to British logistics, 311, 323; Fort Detroit during, 322; French settler participation in, 322; supplying forts during, 319, 321, 333 Popish Plot, 45, 46

523

Porteus, Edward, 424 Port Mahon, 210, 219 Portsmouth, 141, 147, 148, 149–52, 214–15 Povey, John, 71 Povey, Thomas, 34, 36, 38, 43 Powell, Captain John, 116 Powhatan, 123 Pownall, Thomas, 247 praying towns, 347, 349, 362 Presbyterians, 361, 378, 384, 389 Prevost, Augustine, 284 Prevost, Colonel James, 285, 286, 295 Price, Richard, 453–4, 457–8, 463, 464, 490; his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, 458 Prideaux, Brigadier-General John, 296 Prince Edward Island, 295 Prince Rupert, 174 Prince of Wales Fort, 189–92 privateers, 110, 206, 207, 210, 220, 222, 223–4, 225 Privy Council, 34, 474, 475, 476 Providence Island, 117, 128 provisions (army) for Great Lakes forts, 310–11, 322–3, 327, 329; scholarship on, 311–12; storage, spoilage of, 313, 314 Prussia, 482 Punt, Thomas, 116 Puritanism, 346, 347; on baptism, 361; on funerals, 362; and Great Awakening, 350; on land use, 364; on marriage, 361; in Massachusetts and Connecticut, 386; and missionaries to Indians, 349; on music, 354; Occom as Native convert to, 346; on occult, 351; on pride, 353– 4; on revivalism, 361; on shamanism, 349 Pybus, Cassandra, 491 quadrants, 188 Quakers (Society of Friends), 379; and antislavery, 451, 454, 456, 463

524

Index

quartering of troops at Great Lakes forts, 311; and barracks construction, 328–9; reliance on French for, 320, 329, 331 Quebec, 217 Quiberon Bay, 211, 218 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit, 178, 179, 181 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 109, 216 Ramsay, Rev. James, 455 Randolph, Edward, 46, 47, 48, 50–1, 69; on Bermuda, 125 Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act, 453, 462, 465 Rhine River regions, 286 Rhoden, Nancy L., 489–90 Ridge, Captain William, 295 Roanoke, 110, 112, 123 Robinson, John, 425 Robson, Joseph, 190–1, 195 Rochefort, 211–13, 217, 218 Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Duc de La, 284 Rodney, Admiral George Brydges, 223 Rogers, Major Robert, 313, 325, 328 Royal American Regiment (60th Regiment of Foot): as Atlantic microcosm, 284–5; ethnic and regional heterogeneity of, 285, 286; frontier acculturation of, 291, 300; and fur trade in pays d’en haut, 295–6, 297, 298; interest in Nova Scotia, 292–4; interest in Prince Edward Island, 295; and land grant programs, 289–91; and Niagara trade with Amerindians, French civilians, 296; occupation of Great Lakes region by, 313, 317; overview of service, 285, 487; persistent regimental bonds of, 291–2, 300; plan for foreign Protestant force, 285, 286; portage opportunities of, 298–9; preferred regions to settle, 290–21; recruiting colonials, bound labourers, 288; rum sales and military nepotism of, 297; salt contract of,

299; satellite communities of, 291, 292; veterans as tenants, 292 Royal Proclamation (7 October 1763), 289, 290, 292 Royal Society, 136, 137 Rushton, Edward, 458 Russell, John, 153, 154 Rutherfurd, Major Walter, 296–7, 298 Ryley, Philip, 157, 160 Ryswick, Treaty of, 181 St Barnabas Anglican Church, Maryland, 391, 392 St Cast, 211 St Domingue, 452 St George’s, Bermuda, 115, 116, 122 St John, Lady, 61 St John’s River Society, 292–4 St Kitts, 43, 117 St Lawrence River, 226, 227 St Malo, 210–11 salutary neglect, 125 San Juan, Puerto Rico, 217 Santiago, Cuba, 217 Saratoga, 259 Sault Ste Marie, 313, 318 Schama, Simon, 491 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 478 Scotland, 51, 477, 478 Scots, Scotch-Irish, 378–9, 386, 387; in Nova Scotia, 294 Seahorse, 174, 176, 194 Sea Venture, 112–13, 115, 117, 122 Seed, Patricia, 12 Selby, John E., 81 Senecas, 249, 256, 257; Chenussio, 296–7 Seven Years’ War, 23, 28, 236, 486; and formation of Royal American Regiment, 285; and French military, 24, 207, 217, 218, 221, 222, 225 Shaftesbury, 180 Shaftesbury, Lord, 36, 45 Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 115 Sharp, Granville, 453, 454, 455, 456, 458, 459, 463, 464

Index Sherwood Forest, 140, 141, 148; Birkland and Bilhgh, royal woods within, 154, 155, 156; conditions in 1660s, 142; contribution to naval affairs, 152–4; under William III, 143 shipping, 206–7; its interception and disruption, 220, 221–5 Shirley, Governor William, 258, 259, 289, 486 Shish, Jonas, 153–4 Shrewsbury, Lord, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72 Shy, John, 482 Sierra Leone, 460–1, 465 Sioux, 320 Six Nations, 255. See also Haudenosaunee Confederacy Skene, Major Philip, 292 slave trade: American abolition of (1807), 451, 458; American resumption of (in 1783), 457; and British abolition debate, 460, 465; gradual end in America of, 456–7; nonimportation and banning of, 453, 454, 455, 465; parliamentary and Congressional debate on, 452 slavery: metaphors of and American Revolution, 452, 463–4, 465; and Somerset, 458–9, 465; and US Constitution, 453, 458–9, 461, 462, 464, 465 Sloughter, Colonel Henry, 65 Smith, Captain John, 107, 112; his Generall Historie, 122–3 smuggling, 84, 85–6 Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 71 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), 355, 364 Somers, Sir George, 112, 114, 121 Somerset, 458–9, 461, 462, 464, 465 Sommer Island Company, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125 Sommer Islands, 114, 122, 127, 128. See also Bermuda Sosin, J.M., 41 Southampton, Earl of, 155

525

South Carolina, 295, 477 Southwell, Sir Robert: as Blathwayt’s mentor, 34, 35, 36, 38; concerning Andros appointment, 43; correspondence with Blathwayt, 35, 40, 48, 49; significance of, 46–7 Spain, 92; its interest in Bermuda, 109–10, 124; as seaborne competitor, 193–4, 196 Spotswood, Governor Alexander, 88– 9, 90, 92, 483, 484 Spurrell, Captain George, 187, 190, 191, 192 Stamp Act, 419, 421, 451 Stapleton, Sir William, 39, 40, 47 Steele, Ian K., xiv, 95; on Atlantic approach, xx; his Betrayals, 10, 11, 23–4, 479–80; on Board of Trade, 5–6; calendar of scholarly publications, 495–505; combines ethnohistory and empire, 25; on communications and trade, 7–8, 25, 479; compared to Clausewitz, 20, 482; on elites, 9–10, 13; on empire and imperial perspective, 3, 4; on empiricism, asking questions, 20, 22, 25, 27; his The English Atlantic, implications, findings, xiii-xiv, xviii, xix, 6–9, 22–3, 206, 476–7, 485; graduate students of, 507–8; his Guerillas and Grenadiers, 10, 21–2, 25, 26, 476; as historian of war, 18– 19, 20–7; on Hudson Bay sailing, 188; impact on Atlantic history, 476–7, 479; on imperial character, identity, 6–7, 9–10; and imperial school, 478, 479; on imperial warfare and Amerindians, 480–1; on Lisbon, 220; and military history, 10–11, 22–3; and Namier, 5; on North Atlantic influence, 6–7; on Parkman, 21–2; his Politics of Colonial Policy, 474–76, 482; select passages by, 491; stages of scholarship, xxi-xxii, 4–5; on teleology of American Revolution, 4; his “Time, Communications and Society,”

526

Index

476; his Warpaths, 10, 11, 25–6, 27– 8, 480–1, 482 Sterling, James, 296, 297, 319, 325, 327 Stevenson, Captain James, 295, 323, 326 Stobaeus, Killian, 393 Stockholm, 374, 376, 393, 394 Stromness, Orkney Islands, 186 Sunderland, Earl of, 48 Svedberg, Bishop Jesper: and Andreas Hesselius, 388, 391, 396–7, 398–9; his estate, 375; portrait of, 398; related to Hesselius, 374; his son, 375 Sweden: compared with Anglican England, 389; compared with New England, 386; history under Charles XII, 374–5; national self in eighteenth century, 380–2; religious unity and church’s role in, 380–2, 384, 386 Swedish Lutheran Church, 374, 380– 2; compared to Church of England, 391 Switzerland, 285, 286 Talon, Jean, 179 Tangier, 62–3, 483 Tangier Regiment, Second, 63 Temple, Sir William, 34 Tenison, Archbishop Thomas, 70, 71, 75–6 Theyanoguin: at conferences (in 1753, 1754), 235–6, 255; as Mohawk leader, 235–6, 257, 261; relations with Albany Commissioners, 236, 253, 259–60, 262, 263; relations with Johnson, 238, 260–1 Thompson, Joseph, 180 Thornton, A.P., 41 Thornton, John and Samuel, 183 Tillotson, Archbishop John, 478 Tishcohan: Hesselius painting of, 372, 376, 377, 394, 400, 401; portrait of, 373; relations with Penns, 395–6

tobacco, 35, 66, 423–4; and Bermuda 108, 117, 120, 123; Board of Trade’s views on, 85–6, 87, 88; and customs revenues, 86; and mercantilism, 85; merchants in Britain, 84, 85; and reexport trade, 453; regulation system in Virginia, 82, 84–8, 94–5; smuggling of, 84, 85–6; Spotswood’s plan concerning, 88– 9; trade, 83–8; views of merchants on its inspection, 86–7 Tobago, 38 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 417, 434–5 Tories, 72–3, 476 Toulon, 225, 226 Townshend, Captain, 151, 152 Trent River, 142, 143, 153 Tucker, Daniel, 118, 119 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 13 Turnbull, Captain George, 324–5, 325–6, 330, 331 Tuscarora, 347, 360 Uncas, 356 Uncas, Ben III, 356–7, 358, 362; controversy over burial, succession, 358 Uncas, John, 357 Uppsala, 374, 384, 393, 394, 402; Hesselius trained in, 391, 396; sophistication of, 396, 398; University of, 377, 396 Utrecht, Treaty of: and Hudson Bay, 175, 176, 185, 189, 194; stipulations placed on France, 183–4, 194 Van Heemskerk, Laurens, 178 Vaudreuil, Marquis de, Pierre de Rigaud, 479–80 Vérendrye, De La, Pierre Gaultier de Larennes, 192 Vernon, James, 65, 70 Vernon, Vice Admiral Edward, 93, 218 Virginia, 39–40, 44, 477, 479; commerce, 65, 66; Council, 87, 89, 91– 2, 93, 426, 483; country politics in, 484; early settlement compared to

Index Bermuda, 108, 113–14; education in, 65, 66, 421; elite, 65, 71–2, 74, 411–17, 419, 421, 435; elite’s views on Nicholson, 66, 72, 73–4; elite’s views on tobacco inspection, 84, 85, 87, 88; governor and Assembly relations under Spotswood, 89; governor and extension of royal authority, 71–2; House of Delegates, 432; legislation on ports, towns, 66; military defence, 82, 93–4; militia in, 65, 67, 74; and improvements of, 91–2; politics, 91–4; Senate, 432; tobacco trade in, 66, 423–4; and William Gooch, 82. See also House of Burgesses Virginia Company: compared to Bermuda, 123; factionalism and collapse (in 1624), 108, 122; interest in Bermuda supplies, 114, 119; and Sea Venture shipwreck, 112, 117 von Hambach, Frederick, 298 Von Zinzendorf, Count, 400 Wager, First Lord Sir Charles, 192–3 Wahrman, Dror, 462 Walcott, Robert, 59 Waller, Edmund, 125–6 Walpole, Sir Robert, 59, 76, 83, 484 walrus, Atlantic, 176 Walsh, Lorena, 478 Walters, Major, 321 war, secretary of, 33, 35, 41–2 warfare: comparing types, 21; guerilla, 21; history of, 26–7; imperial in North America, 26, 480–1; inland comparison, 209; maritime and destruction of enemy shipping 206–7, 222–5 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 92–3, 192–3 War of the League of Augsburg, 67, 474 War of the Spanish Succession, 477 Washington, George, 412, 416, 426, 451, 489 Webb, Stephen Saunders, 10, 34, 41, 60, 75, 482

527

Weiser, Conrad, 489 Wentworth, Brigadier General Thomas, 93 Wesley, John, his Thoughts on Slavery, 463 West Indies: Blathwayt on administration of, 39; French ships, privateers in, 207; passage to, 477; and rival navies, 208; and slavery, 454, 455– 6, 459–60, 465; and War of Jenkins’ Ear, 92–3, 94 Western Squadron, 222, 224, 225, 226 whaling, 119 Wheelock, Eleazar: established Dartmouth, 488; on Indian education, 347, 349, 355; relations, rift with Occom, 353, 355, 357, 360, 364, 488; as revivalist, 350; school of, 347, 352, 359, 363 Whigs, 67–8, 72–3, 73, 476; ideology and antislavery, 451 Whitbourne, Richard, 124 White, Richard, 11; “middle ground” diplomacy, 311, 312–13, 332–3 Whitefield, George, 350, 354, 488 Wigglesworth, Michael, 116 Wilberforce, 454, 460, 464 Wilcox, Edward, 150–1, 152, 157, 159 Wilkite protests, 454, 461 William III, King: creation of Board of Trade by, 475–6; Dutch loyalties of, 475; earlier as William of Orange, 216, 485; ineffectiveness of Lords of Trade under, 474; and Mary, 482; and patronage, 65; and war with France, 228; and Whigs vs Tories, 67–8, 72; and William Blathwayt, 42 Williams, David A., 89, 94 Williamsburg, design of, 72 Williamson, Sir Joseph, 34, 36, 47 Winthrop, Adam, 124 Wintour, Sir John, 138–39, 144 Witham, Sir John, 39 Wolfe, James, 481

528

Index

Wood, Governor Roger, 120 Woolman, Jonathan, 451 Woolmer Forest, 144, 148 Woolwich dockyard, 153 Wormeley, Elizabeth, 418 Wraxall, Peter, 238, 486; his Abridgment of the Indian Affairs, 236–7, 247, 248

Wriesberg, Lieutenant Daniel, 293 Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association, 454 York Fort, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 194; French attack of, 192 Zacharias, Simon, 115