Sometimes, contrarian theories are labeled as such for a reason. And while the nation’s 250th birthday presents opportunities to make counterfactual arguments about America’s creation, in this case, the conventional wisdom has become such for a reason.
For instance, a new series co-produced by the BBC and PBS looks at the turning points of the American Revolution. Lucy Worsley, a historian, author, and the former curator at Historic Royal Palaces in London, reprises her prior methods for British documentaries, attempting to reexamine old events in light of new evidence. To the theory that America and Great Britain were bound for an explosive breakup, Worsley posits, “I’m not so sure.”
But as a practical matter, a nation as small as Great Britain would have had difficulties governing a nation as vast as America, even the 13 original colonies, under the best of circumstances. And British insistence that American colonists pay for an outside power to govern them made independence inevitable and revolution likely.
Potential Turning Points?
The first episode in Worsley’s series examines points at which the conflicts between the American colonies and the mother state could have avoided coming to blows. She examines the cosmopolitan — and through the mid-1770s, strongly royalist — sentiments of Benjamin Franklin, who lived in London for over a decade and a half in the years leading up to the Revolution. The most famous American to that point, Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and attempted to mediate disputes between the crown as a pseudo-ambassador on behalf of Pennsylvania and several other colonies.
Worsley also notes the other forces attempting to keep Britain’s American Empire intact. The strength of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act — and many Britons’ support of the colonies’ objections to it — meant that Parliament repealed most of the act shortly after its passage.
Fundamental Disagreements
But Britain’s insistence that the colonies pay something toward the security of the Empire meant that sooner or later, the issue would come to blows. While the colonies were not technically independent, and had close economic ties with the mercantile government in London, they were politically autonomous — they raised their own taxes to support their own government — and would not see a second layer of taxation, effectively giving up that freedom, willingly.
Two and a half centuries later, and putting personalities aside, Britain’s position does have a logic to it. Worsley’s episode notes that the French and Indian War, which eliminated the threat of enemy powers lurking on the colonies’ doorstep in America, effectively doubled Britain’s national debt. From London’s perspective, why shouldn’t the colonies pay something toward the greater security they enjoyed? Britain’s position then isn’t that dissimilar from President Trump’s stance toward NATO countries now, except that this time it’s the Americans trying to compel Europe to pay more toward its own security forces rather than the other way round.
In theory, Britain could have asked for voluntary contributions from each of the colonies, as the Continental Congress itself did to help finance the Revolution once war broke out. Or it could have granted the colonies seats in the Westminster Parliament, as it did with Ireland, giving the colonies both taxation and representation.
But neither of those options for solving the fundamental dispute seemed workable over the long term. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created a stronger federal government precisely because the Articles of Confederation’s policy of asking colonies for the money to fund the central government proved woefully weak and ineffective. And cobbling together a transatlantic parliament at a time when travel across that ocean took well over a month wouldn’t have worked much better, if at all.
Size and Strength
That last point bears repeating, as it affects the outcome of the independence debate and the Revolution itself. The modern states that made up the 13 original colonies comprise a landmass more than four times the size of Great Britain; three of them (New York, North Carolina, and Georgia) are each larger than all of England.
Granted, the colonies’ borders at the time of the Revolution were generally smaller (and more amorphous and undefined) than today. But the general point remains that Britain needed to subdue a vast area larger than most of the countries of Europe — and do so from thousands of miles away.
Franklin himself made this point eloquently in an October 1775 letter to Joseph Priestley:
Britain, at the expence (sic) of three millions, has killed 150 Yankies this campaign, which is £20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data … calculate the time and expence (sic) necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.
Even if Gen. Howe or Lord Cornwallis had managed to capture George Washington and his Continental Army — and they nearly did — Britain did not have the manpower or resources to subjugate the entire populace, should the general public (as opposed to merely the armed forces) have persisted in resistance to British rule.
Those same considerations of size and practicality meant the American colonies would always have become independent, just as Canada did nearly a century after the Revolution. Similarly, Britain’s insistence that the American colonies fund the British Exchequer, thereby undermining their local autonomy, tended to foreordain a violent separation. Counterfactual arguments by definition consist of speculation and conjecture, but Worsley’s focus on discrete, isolated incidents seems to ignore the larger trend that the two peoples were moving apart — sooner rather than later.
Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution is available via PBS affiliates (check your local listings) or on the PBS app.
