Infamas Govener": Francis Bernard and the American Revolution
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Stirling Department of History Paper for Research Seminar Programme 15 March 1995 TITLE: The "Infamas Govener": Francis Bernard and the American Revolution Colin Nicolson 1. Introduction 1.1. My research advances the thesis that the inability of Francis Bernard, governor of Massachusetts, to cultivate the political support of colonial conservatives and maximise popular support for the provincial administration contributed to Britain's failure to resolve the "American Question" long before the outbreak of war in 1775. In focusing on the governor's political relationship with conservatives and moderates, rather than, as has been more common, the relationship with the revolutionaries or Patriots, we might understand better why by 1775 the political foundations for a popular Loyalist counter-revolutionary movement in Massachusetts simply did not exist. My research is based on the premise that the American Revolution was -in Carl Becker's well known phrase- both a colonial struggle for home rule and a social and political revolution to decide who should rule at home. But while recent scholarship has emphasised the divisive nature of late colonial politics the prevailing tendency, as I see it, among political and social historians is to marginalise the significance of evidence pertaining to the political behaviour and ideology of those Americans and Britons who opposed the colonial protest movement. For Bernard, at least, and others in positions of power, the advent of colonial protests in the mid-1760s brought about changes in the decision-making process of government and political relationships which undermined the prospects of both Britain and the Loyalists to counteract the Revolution. 1 1.2. It might be said that a suggestion to embark on a biographical study of a colonial governor contradicts current scholarly emphasis upon interdisciplinary approaches and multi- cultural themes. Prosopography and behavioural analyses, for example, rather than biography are, of course, more suitable methods for broad interpretations of the American historical experience in its formative years, 1760 to 1840, when a colonial society on the periphery of the transatlantic world was transformed by a revolution into the first democratic capitalist republic in modern history2. Biography inadvertently -or wittingly in the case of-hagiography and demonology -distorts the historical relevance of common societal experiences. Secondly, 1See Colin Nicolson, "Governor Francis Bernard, the Massachusetts Friends of Government, and the Advent of the Revolution," Proceedings, Massachusetts Historical Society 101 (1991), pp.24-114; Colin Nicolson, "The Friends of Government: Loyalism, Ideology and Politics in Revolutionary Massachusetts" 2 vols, Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1988. 2See Kenneth A Lockridge, "Social Change and the Meaning of the American Revolution", Journal of Social History 7 (1973), pp.403-439; Joyce Appleby, "The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology", Journal of American History 44 (1977), pp.935-958 and "A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America", William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 50 (1993), pp.245-268; Gary B Nash, The Urban Crucible; Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1979). For a brief discussion of multicultural themes and discourse theory in historical writing see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "History: Text vs Context", Proceedings, Massachusetts Historical Society, 101 (1991), pp.1-8. 2 it is in the nature of revolutions that the descendants of the victors and the vanquished cherish conflicting images of the course of human events that changed their forebears' lives forever. Historians of the Revolution are self-conscious of the extent to which such a truism perpetuates a leadership-centred interpretation of late colonial and early American politics. A litany of heroes and villains, including Bernard, has peppered historical writing on the Revolution since the 1790s. Stories of the great deeds of great men who created the United States -the revolutionary generation and the Founding Fathers- are part and parcel of a cultural baggage of American libertarian paradigms and sacred cows. Biographical studies of the most famous revolutionaries or Patriots -Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, the Adamses Samuel, John, and Abigail, and so on- have appeared intermittently since the early nineteenth-century and have never gone out of fashion. They have helped to shape in their own way American national consciousness by raising popular awareness of a revolutionary heritage that studies of eighteenth century Britons perhaps can never aspire to (with the possible exception one might suspect of Tom Paine). Similarly the tribulations of the Revolution's most conspicuous victims, the United Empire Loyalists, have been commemorated in the story of the settlement of Canada. Biographers of the Loyalists have been less prolific than historians of the Patriots, but no less effective in portraying the American revolution not only as a civil war that divided communities from New Hampshire to the Carolinas, but as an internal political revolution that removed from power influential, worthy opponents of the colonial protest movement.3 1.3. Studies of the complex patterns of American society during this period have not, however, precluded analyses of political behaviour in which emphasis has been placed upon the primacy of personal relationships over structural ones. To make sense of political behaviour in an early modern society we must acknowledge that political relationships between individuals rather than social groups were axiomatic to a process centred on a limited number of governmental institutions. The identification of political factions in eighteenth-century America is a problematic endeavour. The early modern party system, involving mass member organisations, articulate campaigning, and agenda setting, did not begin to evolve until the late 1780s. Political organisation on such a scale was one consequence of the Revolution, and it followed, to a degree, the activities of the colonists in nurturing interprovincial opposition to Britain from 1765 onwards. During the late colonial period, effective political power derived from a network of partisan interests and the influence factions exerted through the assemblies and town meetings on the royal governors, government officials and the populace at large.4 1.4. That is not say that influence and power in late eighteenth century American politics were consistently restricted to an elite; on the contrary, the American Revolution, though undeniably a colonial rebellion, was also the first of several major social and political upheavals in Europe and the Americas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that witnessed widespread, and often decisive, popular participation in the political process. Massachusetts's political leaders, for example, were drawn from local "leadership pools." They were not an oligarchy but an elite that dominated the decision-making processes of government 3See Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Belknap Press of the University of Harvard Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1974); Carole Berkin, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York and London, 1974). For a full exposition on works relating to the Loyalists see Robert S Allen, Loyalist Literature: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide to the Writings on the Loyalists of the American Revolution (Toronto and Charlottetown, 1982). 4 Robert M. Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century American Politics (Gambit, Boston, 1971), pp.12-13, Bernard Bailyn, "The Origins of American Politics", Perspectives in American History, I (1967), p.61; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1985) pp.76-79, 135-175. 3 in the town meetings and the legislature yet maintained a symbiotic relationship by means of voluntary associations and extra-legal crowd action with those of lower social status-artisans, craftsmen, small farmers and the like, and even laborers-whose participation in the protest movement was instrumental in its success. The protest movement was a coalition of interest groups and sections directly affected by the reforms: lawyers, farmers, merchants, and artisans who would be paying the bulk of the duties as consumers and businessmen; town representatives, councillors, and municipal officials who decried the infringements to their rights of self-taxation. In the context of the political theory of community power structures, it was the pluralist rather than the elitist qualities of the protest movement which gave the Whigs and Patriots revolutionary appeal. It is sufficient to note that membership of a particular faction was not a prerequisite to participation in local affairs, but that deferential attitudes before the late 1770s and 1780s acted as a counter-weight to grass roots participation in provincial and municipal and provincial offices.5 1.5. By contrast for the "friends of government" and royal officials politics was the preserve of the elite and relationships, while were sustained by the notion of a shared conservative ideology. Biographical studies, as well as prosopographical studies of those involved in government can in this respect help to measure the revolutionary nature