Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
Читать онлайн книгу.
about 30 percent of the population of Britain, about 70 percent of the population of Prussia, which had just held the great Austrian and Russian Empires at bay for almost seven years, and a greater population than the Netherlands or Sweden, noteworthy powers that had swayed the destinies of Europe at times in the previous 150 years. (Admittedly, about 8 percent of the Americans were unenfranchised slaves, who had only the rights their owners allowed from one moment to the next.)
On the other side, the Americans knew that Britain had saved them from a most unappetizing fate at the hands of the French, a prospect made more gruesome and horrifying by any contemplation of what the Indians might have done to make the lives of the colonists shorter and more uncongenial. All informed Americans knew that Britain had gone a long way into debt doing so, and as America was the most prosperous part of the Empire, it had some obligation to shoulder a proportionate share of the cost. It is impossible, at this remove, and buried as these matters now are in the folkloric mythology of the creation of the United States, to guess what degree of unvarnished cynicism might have hastened and made louder the American caterwauling about rights, and the corresponding failure to make any suggestion, apart from Franklin’s worthy improvisation, of an alternative to the stamp tax to retire the debt incurred in the military salvation of America.
The Pennsylvania Assembly adopted a resolution strenuously condemning the Stamp Act, as did the Virginia Assembly, under the influence of the fiery orator Patrick Henry, who advised George III to contemplate the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if either the men or their fates were in the slightest similar, and seeming to condone their ends, an assassination and a pseudo-judicial murder, shortly leading in each case to the elevation of their heirs). The Virginians asserted that the tax was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust. . . . The inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatever upon them,” apart from those legislated in Virginia. This response was known as the Virginia Resolves and was emulated by most of the colonies. The British had designated collectors of the tax, who were pressured into refusing to collect it. With the tax in effect but not being collected, and demonstrations verging on violence around the colonies, nine of the colonies met in New York and declared that taxes could be imposed on the colonists only with their personal consent or that of their elected representatives. This was represented as part of the birthright of Englishmen. It was a stirring stand for individual liberty and rugged individualism, but was nonsense in fact. No sane person will volunteer to be taxed, other than in a severe community or national emergency, and Englishmen were taxed all the time with only a vote of an undemocratically elected House of Commons and a House of Lords that would recoil in horror at the thought that it was answerable to the taxpayers. (It should not be imagined that the colonial houses of assembly had a greatly larger percentage of representation on their voters’ lists, although the procedure of what became known as gerrymandering [after the redistricting artistry of the fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry] had not had the time to plumb the depths of electoral vote-rigging that existed in England.) The rights Englishmen possessed, which distinguished them from most nationalities, except for some Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavians, were freedom of speech and assembly, and access to generally fairly independent courts, as well as some participatory legislative processes, and the Americans received them from and shared them with the British.
14. FRANKLIN’S DIPLOMACY IN LONDON, 1764–1767
The Americans, Franklin was convinced, didn’t want independence, but they wanted an end to inferiority. They recognized the British right to regulate trade between parts of the Empire, but not to do anything that really touched the lives of the colonists. The problem with this outlook was that it amounted to Britain’s having the high privilege of assuring the security of the colonists, at British expense, and no authority to require anything of the colonists in return. Even if such a thing could be negotiated for the future, it left Britain with the heavy cost of having thrown the French out of North America, to protect the colonists, with the beneficiaries loudly claiming that it was their birthright as Englishmen, and the most well-to-do group of Englishmen at that, to refuse to pay anything toward their own salvation. That would not work as the modus operandi of a functioning empire.
On the other side, the British imagined that they could do what they wished legislating over and for the colonists, that there was any truth to the fiction that the British Parliament represented the Americans, that the colonists, like those in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, had no capacity whatever for self-government, and that no American could possibly wish it except a few political demagogues and self-seekers. The Empire was not going to last long on such a flimsy foundation as that, either. It was in this deepening vortex that Franklin worked in London.
Franklin had thought of American representation in the British Parliament, but it was soon clear that matters had deteriorated too far for that. The Americans would not seek it, in the same measure that the British would not offer it. There was already an obvious danger of armed conflict, as there was much talk in London of sending the British army to collect the stamp tax. Fortunately the ministry changed, and Pitt’s friend the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister. Franklin met the new president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, and proposed the suspension of the Stamp Act, until the colonies’ debt levels, which he attributed to the fiscal rigors of the late war, had subsided. (They were modest compared with Britain’s.) And then the Stamp Act could quietly expire. He also warned that the use of armed force to collect taxes in America would fail, as the soldiers would be induced to desert in large numbers by the higher pay scales of the American private sector, and by the impossibility of rounding up deserters in a country so vast and absorbent of dissenters.
On February 13, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament in effect to answer for America. He did so brilliantly. He protested American loyalty, which had been affected by the British imposition of “an internal tax.” There had never been any objection to taxes on exports. Partly because of Franklin’s efforts, the British repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but accompanied that move with the Declaratory Act, which averred that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Franklin wasn’t much bothered by that declaration, as long as nothing was done about it. He cherished a reform of the Empire that would cause Britain to shed even its right to excise taxes on exports. He was more convinced than ever that eventually America would surpass Britain and foresaw a gradual inversion of the relationship, that the American country would be the senior partner. A man of immense subtlety, congeniality, and diplomacy, Franklin exaggerated the ability of others to reason as thoughtfully as he did.
He wrote home very happily of “the august body” of the British Parliament having done the right and sensible thing in repealing the Stamp Act, and predicted imperial reform. By this Franklin meant a single monarch of the Empire, but the main constituent parts entirely self-governing, or coordinating through a grand assembly of representatives meeting in equality and dealing with matters of common interest, as he had proposed for the colonies themselves. The first option was close to what the British Commonwealth became 150 years later, between Britain and what were called the “white Dominions”—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, more or less, South Africa. Of course, all of those countries combined, and adding the United Kingdom, even today, have a population, as Franklin foresaw, that is not much more than half that of the U.S. The second option, with the grand assembly, was emulated to a substantial degree by the advocates of federalism at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where Franklin presided, in 1787 and 1788.
Franklin’s optimism, as frequently happened in his long life, was unjustified. “Every man in England,” he wrote, “. . . seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of ‘our subjects in the colonies.’”20 As usually happens in long-running disagreements, tempers escalated and a natural desire to settle the dispute violently steadily gained ground as a prospect. A similar process would be replicated between the slave-holding and free American states 90 years later (Chapters 6 and 7). The British could speak only of repression by force, tipsy with their Seven Years’ War victories, especially as the Rockingham-Pitt regimes gave way to the king’s friends, the reactionary governments of the Duke of Grafton and Frederick, Lord North. Franklin