Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution - Softcover

Slaughter, Thomas P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809058359 ISBN 13: 9780809058358

Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

An important new interpretation of the American colonists' 150-year struggle to achieve independence

"What do we mean by the Revolution?" John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson in 1815. "The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it." As the distinguished historian Thomas P. Slaughter shows in this landmark history, the roots of the Revolution went back even further than Adams may have realized.
In Slaughter's account, colonists in British North America starting in the early seventeenth century chafed under imperial rule. Though successive British kings called them lawless, they insisted on their moral courage and political principles, and regarded their independence as a great virtue. Their struggles to define this independence took many forms: from New England and Nova Scotia to New York and Pennsylvania and south to the Carolinas, colonists resisted unsympathetic royal governors, smuggled to evade British duties, and organized for armed uprisings.
In the eighteenth century-especially after victories over France-the British were eager to crush these rebellions, but American opposition only intensified. In Independence, Slaughter resets and clarifies the terms of this remarkable development, showing how and why a critical mass of colonists determined that they could not be both independent and subject to the British Crown. By 1775-76, they had become revolutionaries-willing to go to war to defend their independence, not simply to gain it.

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Thomas P. Slaughter

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Independence: The Tangled Roots of

By Thomas P. Slaughter

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2015 Thomas P. Slaughter
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8090-5835-8

1

BORDERLANDS

BY THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, both French and English fishermen were working the waters around Cape Breton, or Île Royale, today part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and trading with the Abenaki and Micmac peoples who had lived and fished there for centuries.2 Norse or Viking, possibly Irish, and other European fishermen and explorers had also frequented the region for hundreds of years. The Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto, also known as John Cabot, passed that way in the fifteenth century; the English captain Charles Leigh recorded making landfall in 1597 along the Atlantic coast at a place whose first French name acknowledged his discovery, Havre à L’Anglois (English Harbor); and Samuel de Champlain at least passed it as he headed south.

By the early seventeenth century, the treacherous six-to-eight-week crossings of the Atlantic to these parts had already become part of maritime lore. “I have been to Canada seven times,” wrote one French captain, “and I venture to state that the most favorable of those voyages gave me more white hairs than all those that I have made elsewhere. It is a continual torment for mind and body.” Another Frenchman admitted his fear of sailing “over the unstable sea, every moment within two fingers of death [à deux doigts de la morte], as the saying goes.” He was mindful of the “muttering, snorting, whistling, howling, storming, rumbling” seas that lifted the ships “aloft upon mountains of water, and thence down as it were into the most profound depths of the world.” But the French and English kept coming for the fish, furs, land, adventure, independence, and wealth that they imagined awaiting them.

French explorers and fur traders founded Port Royal, a post on the Bay of Fundy coast of what we now call Nova Scotia, in 1605. That was less than two years before the first colonists landed at Jamestown, Virginia, establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America, and three years before the French founded another outpost at Quebec. And men from the two nations started fighting almost immediately. Virginia was nine hundred miles away from l’Acadie, as the French called their territory, but that was too close, and the continent of North America was too small, at nine million square miles, for the French and English to coexist peacefully. From the early 1600s through the middle of the eighteenth century, the islands and peninsulas of what we now call the Canadian Maritimes—New Brunswick, l’Acadie (Nova Scotia), Cape Breton Island, Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), and Placentia (Newfoundland)—were a borderland, the front line of conflict between the French and English in the New World.

The French abandoned Port Royal in 1607 rather than winter there. It was difficult to recruit traders and trappers, never mind settlers, and its promoters had to agree to some Huguenots (French Protestants) along with the Catholics, who said they would give it another try in 1610. Both groups survived only because the Micmacs suffered their presence, sustained them with trade, and created enduring connections based on intermarriage—all on the Indians’ terms. Beginning in 1611, when the first two Jesuits arrived in New France, there were actually more conflicts between the missionaries and the men at the trading posts than either had with the Indians. During the winter of 1612–1613, when no supplies arrived from France, the trappers had to disperse to live with the Micmacs in their hunting camps. In the spring, a French ship removed the troublesome Jesuits and took them down the coast of what is now Maine to Mount Desert Island. There men under the command of Samuel Argall—an English pirate who had a commission from the governor of Jamestown to drive out the French—attacked and captured the Jesuits, and, in November 1613, with the help of a Jesuit guide, went on to plunder Port Royal. That effectively ended France’s first settlement in the New World, but in 1608 the French explorer Samuel de Champlain had founded a settlement he called Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, and so the French maintained footholds on the North American continent with their scattered outposts even after abandoning Port Royal to the English.

The French were colonizing North America at precisely the same time as the English were, and this was no coincidence: They did it to challenge the English and establish Catholic settlements in the face of English Protestant ones, and as one front line in the commercial and military warfare that punctuated the creation of the two empires competing with each other and with the Spanish and Dutch. At its peak in 1712, New France stretched from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, a vast territory divided into five colonies—Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Louisiana. New France was always sparsely populated and financially modest in comparison to the English colonies on the mainland of North America.

In 1629, about seventy Scottish Presbyterians landed at the former Port Royal and established a trading mission. “We eat lobsters as big as little children,” one of them raved, “plenty of salmons and salmon trouts, birds of strange and diverse kinds, hawks of all sorts, doves, turtles, pheasants, partridges, black birds, a kind also of hens, wild turkeys, cranes, herons, infinite store of geese, and three or four kinds of ducks, snipes, cormorants, and many sea fouls, whales, seals, castors [beavers], [and] otters.” They, too, got along fine with the ever-flexible Micmac. Nonetheless, the Scottish enterprise failed and, in 1632, an Anglo-French treaty returned l’Acadie and Quebec to France.

The Micmacs, small bands and family groups rather than a unified tribe, were the principal Indian occupants of what is now Nova Scotia, and apparently they never numbered more than three thousand souls spread over the fifty thousand square miles that included what we now call New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the southern part of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. They ranged in concert with the seasons. January brought them to the seacoast to fish for smelt and cod, and to hunt walruses and seals. In February and March they moved inland to hunt beaver, moose, and bear. From April through October, they were back at the seaside villages, where they gathered shellfish, lobster, crabs, and eels, as well as migratory wildfowl in the spring and fall; between July and September they picked nuts, berries, and dry roots. As winter approached, they broke into smaller units to hunt and fish before beginning the annual cycle again in January.

Lines of authority in Micmac bands were vague and variable. Women gathered, cooked, and cared for children, who, unlike those of the European settlers, were not subject to corporal discipline. Men hunted and fished in season, and occasionally waged war on each other, on the Abenaki who lived south of them in what is now Maine, or on the French and English. They were not used to cooperating beyond the level of the band and so battled in small groups with limited aims and without coordinated strategy. They lived in an active spiritual world—surrounded by animal and human manitous (spirits), and ever conscious of their individual and collective ginap (spiritual...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809058359
• ISBN 13: 9780809058358
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 512
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland