Toward the end of his long life, John Adams famously defined the “radical change” that constituted “the real American Revolution” as the loss of “an habitual affection for England.” Large numbers of colonists had deserted their legitimate government and established in its place a loose confederation of republican states: “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected,” Adams said. Well aware of how easily that revolution might have gone awry, he asked, Whence unity out of diversity?
Thomas P. Slaughter, the most recent in a long line of talented men and women who have taken up the challenge posed by Adams, seeks an answer in a return to basics. He takes seriously the words of the North American colonists who left the British Empire in 1776. Readers will find little in his new Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (Hill and Wang) about republican ideology, consumer culture, slavery, native peoples, Atlantic trade, or other topics that have preoccupied recent historians. Slaughter, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, appreciates that scholarship. But he does not see how it explains why 13 clocks struck at once.
Overriding the remarkable diversity and disconnectedness of the colonies, he writes, was a shared political discourse refined in more than a century of frustration among the colonists about their status within the empire. Slaughter devotes the first part of his book to (overly) detailed accounts of political disputes from the 17th century on, all of which make the same point: English-speaking colonists had always celebrated independence as an exercise of “limited autonomy,” while the British saw colonial assertiveness as “an attitude, a swagger, a presumption” that bordered on defiance and begged for discipline.
But “prior to 1763 most Anglo-Americans typically imagined that their national independence would come on some distant day.” Indeed, a colonist protesting the Stamp Act, in 1765, expressed surprise that the British might interpret the right to consent to taxes, as “our fellow-subjects in Britain” do, as “aiming at independance, in the worst sense of the words, i.e., an effort to cast off our allegiance.”
Before the mid-1770s, both sides repeatedly opted to contain conflict rather than force a confrontation that might threaten the empire as a whole. That attitude changed almost overnight. Why?
According to Slaughter, no reason was more crucial than the sudden impotence of ancient enemies. The defeat of the Roman Catholic French and the simultaneous weakening of native peoples who had allied with them during the Seven Years (or French and Indian) War removed a powerful incentive for English-speaking peoples to control their differences. After the Peace of Paris, in 1763, British efforts at reform and revenue collection produced incidents of colonial resistance as they long had, but this time, Parliament lost patience and asserted its full authority in what became known as the Intolerable Acts of 1774. With government in Massachusetts closed and trial by jury suspended, thousands of Americans were suddenly prepared to abandon an empire that forced them into dependence—what they called “slavery.”
That momentous change did not reflect a revolution in attitude or ideology, argues Slaughter, so much as a transformation of “the global context, the perceived significance of the mainland British colonies in the empire, the colonists’ ability and desire to resist, and the resources the empire could and did devote to the administration of its colonies.” The terms of the debate were familiar, but the stakes were greater and exhaustion after decades of tension unbearable. “The war for American independence,” Slaughter concludes, “promised resolution after a century that had brought none.”
So far, a straightforward account of the political origins of the American Revolution. Slaughter’s achievement, bringing together an enormous amount of material in a readable if often disjointed narrative, is formidable. But he has overstated his case.
Slaughter’s relentless focus on imperial disagreements leaves little space for the commerce (in ideas as well as goods) that united Britain and its colonies in the 18th century. Most English-speaking colonists saw advantages in belonging to an empire that championed liberty, commerce, and Protestantism under the protection of the Royal Navy. Slaughter’s commitment to showing how little the Americans and the British got along brings him perilously close to recasting colonial history as an anticipation of the United States. If the timing was contingent, independence (as separation) was ultimately inevitable.
That is how Adams and company saw it, of course. But then they were retrospectively justifying their choices and establishing the legitimacy of the revolution they had begun. What of those Americans who dissented from that interpretation? Strangely, Slaughter pays scant attention to colonists who remained loyal to the empire, including the tens of thousands who abandoned the United States for British Canada. Many Americans disturbed by Parliament’s actions also continued to believe in the possibility of limited autonomy, which suggests that more was at work in the 1770s than changes in the global context.
Slaughter is no better at explaining who “the British” were. They encompassed a range of perspectives on the meaning of independence, including widespread sympathy for the Americans. Similarly, the East India Company’s takeover of Bengal, in the last third of the 18th century, mattered not just because it affected policy decisions in London that provoked American secession but also because it became part of a debate about the nature of empire that transcended particular places. Taken together, the sharp divisions within the colonies and Britain itself suggest that conflict over the rights of English-speaking peoples consumed the empire as a whole rather than pitted Americans against Britons.
Independence admirably cautions historians to beware of two recent tendencies. The first, highlighting trans-Atlantic connections, comes at the cost of neglecting the ways in which Britain and its North American colonies were diverging. Similarly, the second tendency, casting the American Revolution as an all-encompassing social transformation, has obscured the question of independence as a political act. Still, I doubt that it is possible to disentangle either Britain and America or revolution and independence as neatly as Slaughter has.
In the end, his book provides a clearer sense of the political vocabulary that English-speaking peoples shared for more than a century than of why some of them transformed that language into far more radical rhetoric in a matter of months. Slaughter’s readers will know better why Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson protested imperial policy in 1775 by claiming their rights as subjects of King George III than they will why the Continental Congress declared independence the following summer by claiming not only that all men are created equal but that the colonies could manage quite well without a king, let alone the British Empire.
Andrew Cayton is a professor of history at Miami University of Ohio. His most recent book is Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013).