Ford built the book around five case studies, starting in the province of Massachusetts and then moving on to Canada, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales.
In a review for H-Net (P.D.F. download), Dana Rabin writes:
Boston’s Liberty Riot in 1768 illustrates the disorders faced by agents of empire in the run up to the American Revolution. Riot and threats of violence from white colonists revealed the weakness of the Crown and the powerlessness of the king’s agents to enforce the peace. Residents of Massachusetts justified their intimidation and threats of violence with their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep but rather that of white, Protestant men in the name of the people. Ford calls this “the end of empire.”Starting in the 1760s, Massachusetts Whigs feared that Parliament wanted to take more control over the colony. British leaders felt that Massachusetts was trying to operate outside of legal bounds. With each new law, the Whigs felt their warnings were vindicated. With each new resolution or riot protesting a new law, London administrators felt their wish for stronger authority was vindicated. The result was a spiral of resentment and suspicion that no one could resolve.
The book proceeds to reconstruct what Ford considers the ramifications of the American Revolution to the legal history of empire, attributing to Parliament and British colonial officials a new resolve to buttress the king’s power and prerogative against similar future threats. In the period after the American Revolution, the Crown accrued great powers by Acts of Parliament that increased the power of governors and decreased the power of legislative bodies or eliminated them entirely. Judges appointed by the Crown and supervised from London enhanced Crown control over colonial legal systems. The Crown’s expanded power was often framed as a duty to protect.
The focus of chapter 2 is Quebec where white Protestant men again resisted the military rule installed upon British victory in the city in 1759. British Protestant merchants resented any limits to their participation in the fur trade and objected to any concession of rights to French Catholics. Ford argues that in response to their ungovernability and Catholic vulnerability, the Quebec Act of 1774 created a Crown colony in Quebec, granting the governor expanded powers to rule without a legislative body. Even after the creation of the elected assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, legislation was subject to the approval of an appointed upper house and gubernatorial veto.
"Residents of Massachusetts justified their intimidation and threats of violence with their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep but rather that of white, Protestant men in the name of the people."
ReplyDeleteI find this reference to "white, Protestant men" a bit disingenuous.
Yes, it's true that the leaders of Boston's opposition to the crown's policies were white and Protestant and male. But so were the people who created the policies that they were opposing. All of the leading actors, on both sides, were white and Protestant and male. That is how Massachusetts, and British, society was at that time.
Unlike political disruptions in later centuries — including the present — this was not a case of white Protestant men trying to retain their power over other, less favored groups, such as non-whites, non-Christians, or women. If you're going to criticize the Boston Whigs for being white, Protestant males, then you also need to criticize the local Loyalists, and the royal officials both here and in the mother country, for also being white, Protestant males.
The biggest example of racial or ethnic prejudice that we can see in the Boston Whigs was their acceptance of slavery, but that acceptance was almost universal in British America in that era. Indeed, the Boston Whigs were probably more critical of slavery than their counterparts elsewhere in the empire.
The local Whigs were also quite prejudiced against Catholics, but anti-Catholicism played only a very minor role in the politics of the Revolution, in Boston or elsewhere.
Indeed, the principles espoused by the Boston revolutionary leaders eventually led to the removal of restrictive policies towards other ethnic, religious, and yes, gender groups. That may not have been their intent, but they laid the groundwork towards "liberty for all". The foundation that they laid down, in the years shortly after the Revolution, was literally cited in the judicial opinions prohibiting slavery in Massachusetts, and — in our own time — allowing for marriage equality for non-heterosexual partnerships.
I think the crucial distinction was between “the king” and “the people.” For eighteenth-century Britons, “the king” meant the whole apparatus of Parliament, privy council, and monarch working in the king’s name. And “the people” meant white Protestant men with some property and thus a stake in society. The reviewer appears to have wanted to reflect the king/people distinction but also to acknowledge that’s far from how we understand “the people” today.
ReplyDeleteSources from New England in the 1760s and early 1770s show that fear of Catholicism was a major emotional driver in Whig politics, despite (or because of) the absence of Catholics in the region or in the British government. The controversy over imaginary bishops, the Pope Night processions, Samuel Adams’s attempt to dismiss Patrick Carr’s testimony on the assumption he was Catholic, Dr. Joseph Warren’s resolution for Suffolk County against the Quebec Act, the rumors that the Crown was going to recruit Frenchmen to put down the unrest—all that was anti-Catholicism.
Yes, it was amazing that the New England Patriots turned around and accepted help from the French in 1778, then religious freedom on a national level about ten years later (as long as their states kept their own Congregationalist establishments). Our understanding of “the people” was still more than a century away.
Because documents like the Massachusetts constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution contain language about natural rights and “the people,” jurists could use those authorities to rule for equality. But the reason the all white, all male, and largely Protestant groups that composed those documents used terms like “the people” was because they perceived themselves and men like them as rightly speaking for the people and didn’t imagine extending the same power to the entire adult population.