Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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North America, though Pitt and his most talented contemporaries did. And so had an emerging cadre of unusually capable Americans.
16. THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
Jefferson wrote some guidelines for the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress that were judged too radical to be adopted, but one was published in London, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, with the author identified as “A Virginian.” It is a learned but rabidly partisan constitutional-law treatise. Jefferson claimed that the colonists carried to the New World all the rights of free-born Englishmen, and that the unwritten constitution of England assured these rights as, according to the Virginian in question, the colonists had built the colonies “unaided” by the mother country, which was nonsense, of course, and ignored the chief subject of the dispute: the demand of the British to be assisted in recovering their huge investment to protect the colonies from the French. Jefferson claimed that the British were taking the view that the only rights the colonists had were those of conquered people, because the colonies were conquered. This was doubly nonsense, both substantively and because that was not the British position, which was that the Parliament of Great Britain represented all British subjects whether they participated in elections to it or not (another tenuous argument, but they abounded on both sides). Jefferson also improvised the sheer fiction that the pre–Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxons had a fundamental attachment to individual liberties, to which the colonists were legitimate heirs. They had no claim to be continuators of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain before 1066, and those Anglo-Saxons had no such system. The whole argument was moonshine, but it indicated the polemical and casuistic legal skill of Jefferson.
The Continental Congress met in the autumn of 1774 and called for a complete boycott of British goods, and adjourned to May 1775. Before that meeting occurred, the American Revolutionary War had begun. These three men, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, would be the most important of the prominent figures that conducted the American side, a surprisingly talented leadership group, given the colonies’ population of now just under three million, though their distinction has been somewhat exaggerated by the American genius for hyperbole, for the recreated spectacle, and by the star system, which Jefferson largely originated with his fantastic polemical assertions at the new nation’s birth.
The rebels would look to Washington to put together a fighting force from the previously rather unreliable militia (which Washington himself had despised), and successfully resist the battle-hardened British regulars, the Redcoats. Benjamin Franklin, the great diplomat and world-renowned intellectual, would be relied upon to recruit allies by exploiting the fissiparous European interplay of ever-changing balances of power, which always included a deep reservoir of resentment of whichever power had won the last European war, never mind that the suitor was the beneficiary of Britain’s great victory. And Thomas Jefferson would be the chief expositor, not to say propagandist, to make the case that this was not a grubby contest about taxes, colonial ingratitude, and the rights of the martial victor and mother country (all of which it largely was), and to repackage it as an epochal struggle for the rights of man, vital to the hopes and dreams of everyone in the world. Instead of, as Austria would do in the following century, “astound the world with our ingratitude,” America would raise a light unto the nations and uplift the masses of the world with a creative interpretation of its motives.
All three men were suffused with the vision of the rising America, predestined to mighty nationhood. They had the starting strategy for the vertiginous rise of America: Washington the military and commercial might, Franklin the intellectual leadership and diplomatic felicity, Jefferson the clarion of a new order of freedom (unencumbered by a number of incongruities, not least among them the institution of slavery, which all three enjoyed, although Franklin became an abolitionist). The combination of people and events was combustible and would produce both heat and light. Inconveniently prematurely perhaps, but inevitably, the American project would show the world what free men in a new world could do. From the start, the world was watching, and its astonishment at what has followed has not ceased, these 238 years.
1. During the Pugachev Revolt of 1774, which inflamed much of southern Russia, Catherine wrote to her friend the French philosopher and agitator Voltaire that that region had become infected because it was “inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past 40 years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies were populated.” The British made Homeric efforts to persuade Catherine to assist them against France, Spain, and the American colonists in coming years, but Catherine, though an Anglophile and well-disposed, sagely declined, even when offered Minorca as an inducement. (RKM402)
2. In contravention of binding treaties and the judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court.
3. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754–1766, London, Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 203.
4. Anderson, op. cit., p. 173.
5. Anderson, op. cit., p. 226.
6. Anderson, op. cit., p. 298.
7. This version of events, long conventionally accepted, is not undisputed, and it is impossible to be certain of it because of Wolfe’s premature death and the lack of corroboration of his alleged comments, but it still seems likely.
8. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 76.
9. Ibid. p. 74.
10. Ibid. p. 72.
11. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, Childs and Peterson, 1840, vol. 1, p. 255–256.
12. Shortly after, Newfoundland settled into a long notoriety as a poor province. It went bankrupt as an autonomous dominion in the 1930s and more or less fell into the arms of Canada in 1949, but finally became wealthy with the development of off-shore oil in the early twenty-first century.
13. The death of the Czarina Elizabeth is celebrated as the miracle of the House of Brandenburg, and it was invoked by Goebbels and Hitler, inaccurately, in the desperation of their bunker, following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 (Chapter 11).
14. Anderson, op. cit., p. 493.
15. Morgan, op. cit., pp. 86, 90.
16. Morgan, op. cit., p. 114.
17. Ibid. p. 141.
18. Ibid. p. 142.
19. Morgan, op. cit., p. 152.
20. Morgan, op. cit., p. 161.
21. Ibid. p. 163.
22. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America, New York, Grove Press, 2001, p. 16.
23. Burns and Dunn, op. cit., p. 17.
24. Morgan, op. cit., p. 171.
25. Ibid. p. 175.
George Washington
The Americans and French Defeat the British in America, 1774–1789
1. THE END OF EMPIRE IN LONDON
Benjamin Franklin, such a constant figure in the rise and decline of Anglo-American relations through and after the Seven Years’ War, remained in London as trans-Atlantic civil war in the English-speaking world doomfully approached. Franklin published letters with the governor of Massachusetts,