Reconstruction or Industrialisation? - History Forum ~ All Empires

Well i've been really getting into this thread... i wanted to state a few things..

The Act of Confederation and the Continental Congress failed for a series of signal faults in the governmental form. There was no coherent executive, separate from the authority of the legislature. The states could not be compelled to supply revenue, and there was no taxing power, so the Congress only had the funds which were voluntarily given in by the states upon which to operate. That accounted in large measure for the inability to keep a large and effective army in the field despite generous human and material resources. Without Washington, it is doubtful that the "nation" could have kept up a creditable military opposition to the Crown--and the people damned well knew it, too, which is one of the reasons why Washington was so highly respected. Finally, all that states has an equal vote in that Congress, which further hampered the revenue generating ability of the body, because small population states could not easily contribute an equal amount of revenue, and large population states were not going to agree to a formula which derived revenue based on population, while denying them proportional representation with which to have some control over the manner of the disbursement of the revenue.

The ability to organize finances and generate revenue were crucial to an effective government. Contrary to a popular and simple minded formula, the Congress created by the Constitution was not modeled on the English Parliament with its House of Commons and House of Lords. The only state delegation which arrived at the Constitutional Convention with a plan was Virginia. The Virginia plan called for a legislature of a single house, with representation proportional to population, and an executive committee. The former would have virtually made the small population states subservient to the large population states, and the latter would have created a weak executive unable to challenge the power of the purse strings in the legislature. The comprise worked out was to have a two house legislature. All money bills would originate in the House of Representatives, chosen on the basis of population proportion, while powers of sovereignty would reside in the Senate, where all states had equal representation. Therefore, appointments to the executive branch must be approved by the Senate, and treaties must be ratified by two thirds of the Senate--thereby preserving the sovereignty of the states as it existed before they were truly united by the Constitution. Finally, the Electoral College assured that small population states would have more of a voice in the choice of the chief magistrate (the President) than were implied merely by the population of each state.

When you write: The Confederation was a failure, too much particularism making it barely workable . . . i suspect you are just parroting something you read, and that you don't actually understand what that sentence implies. Either that, or you expressed yourself badly.

The colonials thought of themselves as Englishmen, but felt wronged by the Crown, whatever the reasons for that feeling.--This completely abdicates the responsibility to understand why the revolution took place. It was not inevitable. A careful policy by George III might not only have prevented a revolution, but might even have never given the colonists any reason to consider rebellion. The date 1763 is significant because the Treaty of Paris ended two wars which were actually two sides of the same coin. The French and Indian War actually began first, in North America, when George Washington signed a document in which he acknowledged that he had killed a French ambassador--and he signed it because he didn't read French and didn't know what he was signing. Washington was only 22 years old, and commanded a small force of Virginia militia and a Royal American company which refused to take orders from a mere militia officer. A French officer named Jumonville had decided to scout the position, and he and a band of Indians had hidden in a grove near Washington's Fort Necessity. Indians with Washington warned him, and they went into the woods, and launched a surprise attack on Jumonville's little band, and Jumonville was killed. Subsequently, Jumonville's brother lead a force of French and Indians to attack Washington's little force in Great Meadows, and due his lack of experience, Washington agreed to terms of surrender, although, had he known it, Coulon the Villiers, the French commander, was on the point of withdrawing because he knew he could not successfully assualt the position. In the surrender document, Coulon de Villiers included an admission that a French ambassador (his brother Jumonville) had been murdered. There was a Dutchman with the American force, who translated the French document, and read assassinat (murder) as "killed," and Washington was honest enough to admit that Jumonville had been killed.

The French used this as an excuse to declare war in North America, but not in Europe. The unfortunate result for the French was that they lost their North American colony. In 1760, the same year that the French were finally defeated in Canada, George II died. Three years after the French and Indian War had begun in 1754, the Seven Years War had broken out in Europe. The Prussian King, Frederick II (known as Frederick the Great) had begun his career as King in 1740 by attacking Austria, and taking Silesia away from the new Archduchess of Austria, Maria Teresa, whose father had died a few months after Fredericks father. She never forgave him. She had an adviser named von Kaunitz who became her chancellor in the early 1750s. He worked tirelessly to form a coalition against Frederick, and for once, Frederick was caught napping--he didn't see it coming. In 1757, Kaunitz managed a seemingly impossible alliance between France and Austria (they were traditional enemies) to which he joined the Russian Empress, Elizabeth. For the next seven years, Frederick fought for the very life of his kingdom.

England supported Frederick, because they did not want to see France become powerful at the expense of Prussia, and because the King of England was still also the ruler of Hanover, which the French hoped to take away from them. The English sent troops to Hanover, and they spent literally millions to keep the Prussians in the fight. In his deepest, darkest hour, Frederick was the beneficiary of what must have seemed like a miracle. The Empress Elizabeth died, and her son (a congenital idiot) was a great admirer of Frederick (he used to run around the palace in a Prussian uniform), and he withdrew the Russians from the alliance. Frederick had a brief breathing spell--the Emperor Peter III was murdered six months later, at the instigation of his wife, Ekaterina, who was to become the Empress Catherine the Great. But Frederick improved on the opportunity, and marched with a Russian army, which had orders not to fight the Austrians. But the Austrians didn't know that, and Frederick was able to force the Austrians to come to terms.

Why should any of this be important to America? Well, the English Parliament had spent a fortune to keep the Prussians in the war, and had spent a good deal to fight the French in North America. They therefore needed to make up the revenue. It was pretty certain that a Parliament filled with land owners or their paid politicians was not going to vote to increase the property tax, and those members of Parliament who were not land owners were merchants or represented merchants, so they were not going to increase the excise. The fatal decision was that they would enforce the tax on sugar in North America, and that they would pass other revenue measures to get the money out of the Americans.

That was just part one, but i'll explain it before i go on to part two. There had always been a tax on sugar, and the Americans had always ignored it. Originally, the Sugar and Molasses Act had imposed a tax of six pence on a gallon of imported molasses, to assure that the molasses from English islands in the West Indies would be bought, and not molasses from the French islands. This was important, too, because New Englanders bought a whole hell of a lot of molasses, to make rum, which they then smuggled into Europe--and it made them rich. They'd make rum, sell some of it in England, but most of it was smuggled into England and Holland. Then they'd use the proceeds to buy cheap trade goods, and sail to West Africa, where they'd buy slaves. Then they'd sail for the West Indies, sell the slaves, buy molasses and begin the process all over again.

However, the English islands did not produce enough molasses to meet the demands of England and the colonies, so, for many generations, New Englanders had smuggled molasses, and had bribed local officials to look the other way. The Sugar Act of 1764 actually lowered the tax on molasses, but it also came with new enforcement measures. The Royal Navy sent ships to stop the smuggling, and admiralty courts were set up to try those accused of smuggling. Previously, if someone were actually caught, they would go before a local jury which inevitably let them off. The colonists howled.

When George Frederick William, who would become King George III was a boy, his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, died. King George II and the Prince of Wales had never gotten along, and the King's grandson, George, had lead a rather bleak and lonely life as a boy. He was thirteen when is father died (from an injury), and suddenly he was the heir to the throne. His mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, did not like her father-in-law, and did not trust him, and she hired John Stuart, Earl of Bute, to be George's tutor and companion. The Earl of Bute was rather a misanthropic sort himself, and his friends were mostly army officers. George had never been "out in society," and Lord Bute now took him around to meet his military friends.

George II died in 1760, at the height of two wars on either side of the Atlantic, and George III took the throne, just 22 years of age. He made the Earl of Bute his Prime Minister as soon as he decently do so. It was a big mistake. The Earl of Bute was a firm believer in the divine right of Kings, and he despised the Americans. After the war, a lot of his buddies were out of a job, now that the war was over. In those days, England did not keep a large standing army, so when a war ended, officers (who were never paid much to begin with) were put on half-pay, so they could be called back if they were needed. That wasn't enough money to live in style (and for lower ranking officers, it wasn't even enough to live on). So the Earl of Bute and George came up with what they thought was a brillian way to find work for their friends, and to kill a second bird with the same stone. The war had pointed up the need for troops permanent stationed in America, so the Parliament authorized the raising of Royal American troops in the colonies. Additionally, the Lords of Trade (a committee appointed by Parliament to govern the colonies) had decided that the Americans should be prevented from crossing the mountains to the west, and that that region should be kept free of colonists. It was a practical, and a cynical decision. With the French out of the picture, the English had a good chance to corner the market on beaver pelts, a very rich product of North America. The Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670 by Charles II, had long been making a handful of people rich in England, and was virtually a sovereign power unto itself. Now, the region of the Great Lakes which the French had always exploited for furs was open to England, and a good many men in Parliament saw a chance to make themselves as rich as the Moncks and Churchills and others who had gotten in on the ground floor of the Hudson's Bay Company.

So, two things happened which pissed off Americans who had otherwise been loyal subjects, and who would have likely remained loyal subjects, had George III and Lord Bute not been such idiots. The Americans had spent a lot of blood and treasure to fight for George II in the French and Indian War. They deeply resented having a tax burden put on them to pay for the King's military ventures in Germany, which they saw as simply done to keep Hanover safe. They also resented all these officers and new companies of Royal Americans descending upon them when they had protected themselves for over 150 years without very damned much help from London, thank you very much.

Things went from bad to worse. Read about the Quartering Act, and the riots in New York as a result. Read about the Stamp Act, the Boston Port Act, and what the Americans called the "Intolerable Acts." The Americans howled about paying the Sugar tax, because they had always gotten away with not paying it before. But the Stamp Act was a different matter altogether, and they objected to it because they were not represented in the Parliament which had passed it. Parliament told them they were "virtually represented." Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but they then passed the Declaratory Act, in which they stated that they were competent to legislate in any matters at all relating to the colonies.

Things went pretty rapidly from bad to worse. Just about everything the government in London could do to make matters worse, they did. Just about everything rabble-rousers like Sam Adams could do to imflame people's anger, they did. The revolution need never have happened, and a careful study of the period from 1763 to 1775 will teach anyone a good deal about practical politics, and the politics of rebellion.

When you continually refer to "the industrial revolution," you make it sound as though it were some discrete event which took place in America at some point between 1763 and 1877. It wasn't. The origins of the "industrial revolution" stretch back to 1200, when Europe began to get colder, and architecture and textile manufacture to deal with the situation became important. Several events took place between 1200 and the present (the "industrial revolution" has never ended) which were significant, and had nothing to do with North America. The use of steam engines to pump water from deep mines beginning in 1712 is often cited as the beginning of the "industrial revolution," while other people point to the use of steam engines in cotton and wool mills in the 1760s--something else which has nothing to do with North America. Others point to the proliferation of railroads--something which becomes important in North America after 1877, at the end of Grant's second term as President.

History teachers throw around phrases like "particularism" and "industrial revolution" because they aren't really well educated in the subjects they teach, and they want to make it simple for students who don't care about the subject. The students don't care because the text books are badly written and their teachers are too ignorant to make it interesting to them.

You could spend the rest of your life reading enough to understand the period 1763-1877 in American history. Probably, though, if your textbook and teacher are slinging around terms such as "particularism" and "industrial revolution," the best thing you can do is throw them right back, and learn to make it look as though you know what you're writing about.