SLAVERY: American Colonies before 1776

Betty Wood explains the
 economic aspects of
slavery in the colonies. 

Slavery issue was a hot button in the American colonies in the years leading up to the American Revolution. It was a phenomenon of the southern states, those led by Oxonians, rather than of New England, which were colonized more by Cambridge alums.

Opposition to slavery in the last quarter of the 18th century was muted by a common need to oppose the Crown. This colonies were thereby unified long enough for the United States to be formed.

How did this evolve, and how were Oxford and Cambridge alumni involved?

Colonial Economics and Slavery

The Spanish and Portuguese colonies produced gold, silver and other valuable commodities like sugar for their colonial masters.

The same could not be said for the British colonies in the early years. The colonies were viewed as a place for emigrants from Britain to obtain the freedom that comes with land ownership. It was also a market for British goods, but this depended on the colonies generating their own export income, which took some time for them to do.

The mercantilist business model of the Spanish and Portuguese rulers depended heavily on slavery. The mines and single-crop agriculture (sugar and tropical fruits) depended on having a large work force of low-cost workers.

Initially, the British model was based on the idea that each emigrant would be given some land and Britain surplus population could be put to use on the free land in the New World. Oxonian James  Oglethorpe conceived his new colony of Georgia as a place where slavery would be outlawed and the work force would be made up of convicts or the overlapping category of poor British people (in those days, poverty was an offense; one could go to prison for not paying back debt).

But initial British settlements did not last and others felt threatened by the harsh winters, by native Indians who resisted the arrival of the settlers, by settlers from other countries like Spain coming north from  Florida, or from France coming south or east into New York.

Sugar plantations didn't fare so well in the new American colonies, but early on tobacco became a major cash crop. Then, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin made possible the harvesting of short-staple cotton and made cotton farming very profitable.

As tobacco and cotton farming grew, the value of slaves in working on the farms became more evident, and the American colonies began importing slaves. The profitable farms also made the colonies themselves more profitable, and the market in the South grew for goods from New England, the mid-Atlantic colonies and from the Mother Country. William Pitt decided that the American colonies were worth fighting over, and he sent an army to chase the French and unfriendly Indians out of the colonies, but left behind debts for his successors to pay for, setting up the dynamics for the American Revolution.

Secular and Religious Movements against Slavery

The movement against slavery came early on from evangelical ministers and Quaker preachers and later from rational philosophers concerned with human rights.

Baptists in the early colonies were often opposed to slavery. Chad Brown (c. 1600-1650), a Baptist minister who co-founded Providence with Roger Williams (alumnus of Pembroke College, Cambridge) was one of the first prominent abolitionists in the colonies.

Rationalist thinkers of the Scottish and English Enlightenment in the mid- to- late 18th century (David Hume died in 1776) criticized slavery for violating basic human rights.

The First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s in the colonies produced movements against slavery, which was seen as un-Christian.

Quakers in North America and Great Britain became well known for their involvement in abolition. During the colonial era in America, it was common for Friends in British America to own slaves. During the early to mid-1700s a disquiet about this practice arose,  through the work of abolitionist Quakers in Philadelphia like Anthony Benezet and John Woolman. By the time of the American Revolution few Friends still owned slaves and Cambridge-educated abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Pitt (the Younger) were opposing slavery in parliament.

Moses Brown was one of four Rhode Island brothers who, in 1764, organized and funded the tragic and fateful voyage of the slave ship named Sally. Moses Brown had a crisis of conscience and broke  from his three brothers, becoming an abolitionist and a Christian Quaker. The brothers co-founded the college that became Brown University. The family, active mainly in the Baptist community of Providence, was descended from Chad Brown. Brown's brother-in-law and business partner, Jabez Bowen, was a Yale graduate and notable Rhode Island political figure. Three years before the American Revolution broke out, Moses Brown freed the last of his slaves.

James Edward Oglethorpe (1696-1785), a graduate of Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was among the first to articulate the secular Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanistic grounds (until his influence waned), arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to pursue the cause after his death.

Granville Sharp was an attorney who helped defend the slave Somersett. The Somersett's Case in 1771 emancipated a slave who ran away from his master in England. It established the principle that a slave obtains freedom upon reaching Britain, which helped launch the British movement to abolish slavery that Wilberforce and others picked up after the Revolution.

Though anti-slavery sentiments were widespread and growing after the American Revolution, the new American states that used slave labor, including in the South of the United States, continued to do so.

Benjamin Franklin's Three Visits to England, 1724-1775

How did growing British opposition to slavery affect public opinion in the American colonies? One way was Benjamin Franklin, who made three pre-Revolutionary visits to England, lasting 18 years. He had increasing access to the political leadership. The following summary is based primarily on data from a Revolutionary War website:

On his first trip in 1724-26, Benjamin Franklin went to England when he was 18 to buy printing equipment that the Governor of the colony of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith, promised to pay for. But Governor Keith did not send to London the needed letter of credit. Franklin therefore worked for  the famed printing house of Samuel Palmer (and later with another famed printer, James Watts) to earn the fare to go back to Philadelphia. Franklin left London in 1726 with Thomas Denham, a Philadelphia shopkeeper who hired Franklin when they returned.

By the time of his second trip to England in 1757, Franklin had served in Pennsylvania as a city councilman, state assemblyman, and Deputy Postmaster General. Pennsylvania was formally owned by the Penn family, since a Royal Charter from Charles II was issued to William Penn in 1681, granting the land to him and his heirs. The colony had a democratic legislature but the Penn family could override it. Conflicts developed over the years between the state Assembly and the Penn family. In 1757, the Pennsylvania Assembly hired Ben Franklin to represent before George II their concerns about the Penn family's arbitrary authority and its exemption from taxes. Franklin was in England for five years but failed in his mission, leaving London in 1762.

Franklin's last and longest trip occurred at the behest of the Pennsylvania Assembly within two years after he returned. The legislature was outraged by George III's Sugar Act, his proposed Stamp Act and other laws initiated by George III's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend. Franklin sailed in 1764 to represent Pennsylvania's interests before the King. He was in England until 1775, later representing other colonies - Massachusetts, New Jersey and Georgia.

Benjamin Franklin used some ingenuity in making the colonies' case in England. For example, he argued that slavery in the colonies was different from slavery in the Caribbean islands and in Brazil, on the basis (among other differences) that slaves in the colonies were allowed to have families. Franklin saw in London the belligerence of the British lawmakers and came to the view that  diplomacy was not going to solve the colonies' problem with the King. He left London in March 1775 and arrived in Philadelphia on May 5. The next day he was elected by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress.

Slave traders. Benjamin Franklin argued that slavery in
the West Indies was immoral, but was not such a problem
in the American mainland colonies. Anti-slavery themes
were applied to the relations between the colonies and Britain.

The Growth of Slavery in the American Colonies

Whatever the progress of ideas in opposition to slavery in the American colonies, the fact is that  an estimated 12 million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas during the most active decades of the slave trade.

During that entire period, a relatively small fraction, about 287,000 slaves were brought to the North American colonies - only 2.4 percent of all the slaves. Most of the 11.7 million other slaves were sold in the Caribbean Islands and Brazil, where they had a shorter life expectancy because they tended to be worked harder and they had no family life. The slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil were said to be in need, in the blind language of the time, of being "replenished".

Although conditions of slaves in the American colonies were terrible, the weather was not as brutal as in the Caribbean and slaves were at least in homes and on farms with a place to live, and often were allowed to have children. Consequently their life expectancy was reportedly higher than most other parts of the continent where slavery existed.

The importation of slaves into the colonies peaked in the decade before the American Revolution. In the 17th century, the colonies imported 21,000 slaves. In the 18th century up to 1760, 189,000 slaves were imported. In the 1760s, another 63,000. In the 1770s, another 15,000.

Benjamin Franklin's Changing Views on Slavery

Franklin himself was a runaway, from a despotic brother and father and the contract that they signed with him binding him to work for them. Yet Franklin relied on slave labor at home and in his business. His newspaper relied heavily on advertising from slave auctioneers and from slaveowners pursuing runaways. This is all in David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

After the Revolution, historians give great credit to the abolitionists who, in due course, stirred up emotions on both sides that precipitated the Civil War. Benjamin Franklin is counted among these abolitionists.

But before the Revolution, Franklin was much less activist on the subject of slavery within the United States. He was based in England for 16 of the 18 years before the Revolution! Antagonism toward slaveowners emerged on the secular side for reasons unrelated to Enlightenment views on human rights. The 1764 revenue tax on French and Dutch sugar benefited British plantation owners. They were able to raise their prices at the expense of people living in the mainland American colonies. At the time, the British Parliament considered the West Indies a far more profitable part of the world for them than the mainland colonies, and the objections of the mainlanders, represented in England by Franklin among others, did not get much of a hearing.

The reaction back home in the colonies was one of outrage at both Parliament and the "nabob" plantation owners in the West Indies. One form it took was opposition to slavery - opposition to slavery in the plantations and opposition to the slavery of the colonies to the mother country. But it did not mean questioning the existence of slavery in the colonies, where the concentration of power and money was not as great as in the West Indies and where the colonies agreed to disagree on issues like slavery because they wanted to be united against the Crown.

Franklin and other leaders in the colonies - Steven Hopkins, Governor of Rhode Island, and James Otis, Jr. - a Harvard-educated writer who pushed the anti-slavery arguments to the extreme - painted a picture of all residents of the colonies being slaves to the British crown and Parliament.

The Revolutionary spirit did not precede the antislavery argument, as has often been taught. Instead, the Revolution can be said to have emerged from taking antislavery arguments applied to the wealthy British West Indies slaveowners and applying them to the relations between the colonies and the mother country.  (Waldstreicher, pp. 177-179.)

So the pre-Revolutionary colonies were antislavery relative to the West Indies, their leaders took the view that "slaves, or their labor, was unimportant in mainland America" (Waldstreicher, p. 180). Their sugar slavers were evil, whereas the colonies were slaveowners in some kind of moderation, and were okay.

Benjamin Franklin maintained a dialog on slavery issues in Britain with David Hume, William Pitt the Elder (Trinity, Oxford), Lord Mansfield (Christ Church, Oxford), Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Hillsborough (who maintained a hard line against the colonies after the Townshend Acts), Scottish poet William Knox and Samuel Johnson (Pembroke, Oxford).

Franklin is described as being "downright crafty" in making the case for the innocence of the American colonies. In England, Franklin shifted his focus on the labor of the American colonies to the importance of the land in contributing to British welfare, while insisting that Americans "are not, never were, nor ever will be [Britain's] slaves."

Franklin was supported by Pitt the Elder, who in retirement opposed the taxes and echoed Franklin's argument that the American colonists  were not slaves of the British. Pitt was a hero to Americans because when he was Prime Minister his soldiers had chased the French and their Indian allies from the colonies during the Seven Years ("French and Indian") War; Pittsburgh is named after him - it was formerly the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne.

OXBRIDGE: Influences on Colonial America (Updated May 4, 2016)

New England colonies: CT, MA, NH, RI. (ME was part of MA.)
Mid-Atlantic: MD, NJ, NY, PA, DE. Southern: GA, NC, SC, VA.

My posts (see links below) on the influence of Oxford and Cambridge on the American colonies add up to a draft of a book.

A chart summarizing the Oxford influences may be found here. The following outline shows how the posts fit into an overall outline:

TOPIC: How did Oxford and Cambridge men (they were all men, then) help form the United States of America?

Chapter 1. Early Settlements ("Virginia",  "Carolina"). Sir Walter Raleigh (Oriel College, Oxford) gave the name Virginia to the entire south-eastern seaboard, after Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Raleigh landed at Roanoake Island (now part of North Carolina) in 1584 and again in 1587, bringing more than 100 settlers, but when he returned with the supplies and new settlers, the previous ones had mysteriously disappeared. So there was no ongoing settlement that survived. Raleigh was accompanied by Thomas Harriot (St. Mary, Oxford, which was absorbed into Oriel College), an under-appreciated Oxonian astronomer, navigator, explorer and linguist who is credited with inventing the concept of refraction and with bringing the potato to England. Various sources (e.g., Wikipedia entry on Harriot) show a portrait hanging in Trinity College, Oxford and identify it as Harriot - however, about 50 years ago the College inspected the portrait carefully and decided that the dating and provenance of the portrait make it highly unlikely that the subject is in fact Harriot. The 1607 Jamestown settlement in Virginia survived more successfully, establishing as the Oxford style of settlement the entrepreneurial one. This style was the rule from Georgia up to New Jersey, and was driven by grants of land from the Crown.

Chapter 2. New England Colonies (Yellow). In the colonies of what we now call New England, the impetus to come to America arose from religious persecution in England. The religious emigres from England were bent on creating a friendly and holy new society in American and had no plans to return. The source of discontent was with the complacency of the post-Henry VIII Church of England. Many nobles and scholars saw the C of E as suffering from the same problems that Protestants complained about in the pre-Reformation (Roman) Catholic Church. The C of E was viewed as an unholy agent of the Crown. The Puritan movement originated in certain pockets of Britain, and Cambridge was once of them–especially at certain colleges, such as Emmanuel, St. Catharine's Hall, Sidney Sussex and Christ's College. During the early part of the 17th century, Cambridge produced many dissenters, from whom came the 20,000 Puritans who populated New England during the Great Migration of the 1630s seeking freedom of worship. The educational leaders from among the Pilgrims were largely Cambridge men - for example, John Winthrop (Trinity, Cambridge) in Massachusetts; Roger Williams (Pembroke, Cambridge) in Rhode Island; and John Wheelwright (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) in New Hampshire.

• Massachusetts was colonized by the Massachusetts Bay Company in London. John Winthrop (Trinity, Cambridge) was involved in its formation and he urged that its charter be moved to the colony itself. Thus the colonizing company became a self-governing commonwealth, welcoming nonconformist religious sects. He was in 1588 in Suffolk, England. He led the Winthrop Fleet of 1630, the largest English fleet to set off for the New World. Winthrop was a Puritan, dissenting from the Anglican Church for hewing too close to Catholic liturgy. He was elected governor before departure and he was re-elected several times. As governor, he tried to moderate the colonists, emphasizing the need to care for the poor, avoid executing too many people for heresy, and not being too strict about requiring women to wear veils. He wrote the famed "City on the Hill" sermon that implied God had chosen the settlers to create a sanctified America. John Harvard (Emmanuel, Cambridge) in 1636 founded the first enduring American university, Harvard. 

• Rhode Island was led by Roger Williams (Pembroke, Cambridge) who along with Anne Hutchinson left Massachusetts when the Puritans there expelled them. Both fled to Rhode Island. Hutchinson and Williams had been preaching against against Puritan doctrines and the takeover of a government by a religious group. They fled to Rhode Island, establishing the colony as a haven for religious liberty and welcoming Jews and Quakers. Founded by the most radical dissenters from the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Rhode Island on May 4, 1776 became the first North American colony to renounce allegiance to George III. However, it was a center of the slave trade, because it brought molasses from the Caribbean Islands in exchange for slaves, and made it into rum which it used to buy slaves in West Africa. Rhode Island was the last of the original 13 states to ratify the American Constitution on May 29, 1790. 

• New Hampshire was colonized in part by refugees from intolerance in Massachusetts, including John Wheelwright (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge), who founded the towns of Exeter, N.H. (and then Wells, Maine) as he fled from the long arm of Puritan orthodoxy.

• Connecticut is the home of Yale University, which was formed in a similar fashion to Cambridge's origins as a home to Oxford scholars fleeing from the university's persecution of non-conformists. (Archbishop Laud was for a time Chancellor of Oxford and recruited Lawrence Washington, George Washington's grandfather, to help oust non-conformist dons.) Yale was founded by a branch of Puritans who favored the evangelical style of a reformist minister and fled from Harvard's disapproval of of his doctrine and style.

These migrations originating in religious persecution may be said to have pursued the Cambridge style of settlement, based on religious faith rather than entrepreneurial ambitions.

Chapter 3. The Mid-Atlantic Colonies (Green). Catholic George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore (Trinity, Oxford) and his two sons founded Maryland as a haven for Catholics. But most settlers were setting out for the New World in order to prosper and the  southern colonies offered opportunities to make fortunes in tobacco, cotton (especially after Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin) and other export crops. The early colonial settlers in the Mid-Atlantic colonies were given grants of land by King Charles I, especially during the period 1629-1640 when Charles dissolved Parliament and ruled without it.

• New York was settled by Dutchmen and French Huguenots before it was taken over by the British after a naval victory over Holland. It was named after James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II, who was restored to the throne as James II of England after Cromwell's government ended in 1639-40.  The New York colony, while huge, was preceded by Dutch settlers and became a moderating influence between the nonconformists of New England and the more conformist views of the colonies to the south of New York.

• Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics, carved out of the northern reaches of territory that Virginia had some claims to. Charles I gave this land to the first Lord Baltimore (Trinity, Oxford). His sons Cecil Calvert, 2nd Lord Baltimore (Trinity, Oxford) and Leonard Calvert (Trinity, Oxford) managed the growth of the state. The elder son Cecil worked the British side of the Atlantic; he is the person after whom the City of Baltimore is named. He successfully staved off challenges to the actions of Charles I during the rule of Oliver Cromwell (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) and the Roundheads. The younger son, Leonard Calvert, migrated to Maryland and became its first governor.

• Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn (Christ Church, Oxford), who converted to Quakerism and persuaded Charles II and James II to give him land from Western New Jersey and north of Maryland to create a colony where any religions could be practiced without interference. One argument he made to the two kings is that his state could be a place to send religious troublemakers in England. Part of Pennsylvania was carved out to create Delaware, because the established settlers from the outset didn't want to be part of the plan of a Quaker governor. Penn's settlement was the most concentrated migration to the colonies since the Puritan migration of a half-century before.

• New Jersey began with land taken from the southern end of the New York colony, as in 1664 James II gave the land to Lord John Berkeley and Sir John Carteret, two Stuart loyalists.

Chapter 4. The Southern Colonies (Purple).  Religious settlers in the south include James Oglethorpe (Corpus Christi, Oxford) and John and Charles Wesley (both Christ Church, Oxford) in Georgia.

• Virginia was originally the name of the entire southeast coastline, settled unsuccessfully by Sir Walter Raleigh, who landed with private funding at Roanoke Island in what is now called North Carolina. Maryland was carved out of Virginia from the north and the Carolinas from the south (Georgia was created partly as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the Carolinas). The cultivation of tobacco in Virginia meant that slavery grew in the state along with opportunity for British landowners like George Washington's ancestors.

• The Carolinas were settled in part by John Baron Carteret, the 2nd Earl Granville (Christ Church, Oxford). Carolina was named after Charles I, the only British monarch ever executed,  after Cromwell captured him during his retreat in Oxford. The area around Cape Fear was given to eight proprietors by Charles II in return for their support for his succeeding to the monarchy. Carteret inherited from his great-grandfather Sir George Carteret one-eighth of the Province of Carolina along the Virginia border. Unlike other owners, Granville refused to sell the property back to the Crown. He was the real power in the government when Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington (Trinity, Oxford) was Britain's 2nd prime minister, after Walpole.

• Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe (Christ Church, Oxford), who persuaded George II to let him found a slave-free colony to absorb all the prisoners in debtor prisons. (In fact, skilled craftsmen and merchants crowded out the prisoners and they were instead sent to Australia.)  John Wesley (Lincoln, Oxford) came to help Oglethorpe with his mission. The colony also served as a buffer zone against the Spanish in Florida, notably in the settlement of St. Augustine. Although Oglethorpe does not appear to have been a great military commander on the attack side, his troops fended off a Spanish invasion of Georgia. Never again did the Spanish attack the colonies.  The ban on slavery was, alas, removed as soon as Oglethorpe returned to England, as Georgia went into the cotton business.

Chapter 5. The British Civil War and New Migrations to the Colonies. When Oliver Cromwell (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) organized the protestors against Charles I and beheaded him, the tables were turned on royalist Cavaliers like Rev. Lawrence Washington (BNC, Oxford) and his wife Amphilis Washington. The Puritans, who had left England because of persecution by Catholic monarchs, were now in charge. Rev. Washington lost his comfortable living in Purleigh, Essex, and his wife Amphilis persuaded their sons John and Lawrence Jr. to emigrate to Virginia. John's great-grandson George Washington became the new nation's first President.

Chapter 6. Pitt and North - Runup to the Revolution. Pitt the Elder (Trinity, Oxford) made possible the Revolution by chasing French soldiers out of North America.  Lord North (Trinity, Oxford) made the Revolution inevitable through his onerous taxes to pay for Pitt's war.

Chapter 7. Oxbridge Influences On the American Revolution and the New Nation

• Slavery in the American Colonies

• Economics - Resistance to External Taxation, Regulation [Oxford - Adam Smith]

• Religious Wars at Oxford and Cambridge [add Oliver Cromwell, Sidney Sussex]

• Universities in the Colonies [Crossover of religious wars to the colonies]

• Architecture at Oxford [Gargoyles and Grotesques, +]

• The Stars and Stripes and the flag's origins in the Washington family.

• The Political Debate among the Founding Fathers, and its British analog.

Suggestions for additions/changes are appreciated - teppermarlin@aol.com. 

Two Oxonians Created the USA, Pitt and North (Superseded)

Borneman's "The French and Indian
War" places it in the context of the
struggles for power in Europe.

The content of the following book review has been abbreviated and utilized in the following post:

http://ox-cam-nyc.blogspot.com/2013/10/oxonians-at-odds-pitt-north-and.html

For the writer's purposes the post has been superseded, but the original review is being retained for those who have linked to it or who are interested in knowing more about the French and Indian War or Borneman's book on the subject.

***

During the past two weeks in the Florida sun, I found a book to read that I recommend highly to anyone interested in the origins of the British Empire and the United States of America.

Walter Borneman's 2006 book, published by HarperCollins, shows how the British managed to drive the French out of North America - and along with them, eventually, the Spanish and the Native Americans whom they called Indians - and yet created animosities that led to the booting of the Brits from 13 of the colonies. (King George III kept control of Quebec.)

Two Oxonians, William Pitt the Elder (the "Great Commoner" who later became earl of Chatham) and Frederick North (2nd earl of Guilford), have their names attached to many places in the United States, even though neither one set foot on the American Continent.

Pittsburgh, Penn., for example, and Pittsfield, Mass., and Guilford, Conn. And North Dakota (just kidding).

Both Pitt and North attended Trinity College, Oxford but they are judged very differently by history. Pitt was a passionate strategist for the successful creation of the British Empire during the Seven Years War in Europe. North was a passionate ally of George III in trying to put the American colonies in their place.

Pitt made possible the independence of the American colonies. So long as the French were a threat, the colonies were dependent on the British military to defend them.

The outcome of independence would not have bothered Pitt himself. He was a fierce devotee of the colonies and vigorously opposed the Stamp Act in 1766 ("The Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England.), argued for removing British troops from Boston and deplored the attitude toward the colonies of Lord North. Pitt wished not long before his death that he were ten years younger so that he could

spend the remainder of my days in America, which has already given the most brilliant proofs of its independent spirit. (Borneman, p. 305, citing J. C. Long's 1940 book on Pitt.)

Borneman, who lives in Colorado, has previously written about the War of 1812. He shows that George II was wrapped up in keeping his "prized possession," Hanover. The king sent his "most treasured son", the duke of Cumberland, to defend Hanover, but the duke was surrounded by the French at Hastenbeck in Germany, and was forced to surrender Hanover to the French. Cumberland escaped with the help of Colonel Jeffrey Amherst, and on his return to Britain "resigned his military offices in disgrace".

Borneman provides highly readable summaries of the different battles in North American, showing how the outcome of these battles hinged on the strategic sense of commanders, and the importance of sometimes small numbers of savvy soldiers. He portrays Pontiac as an able military commander but questions how important he was as a leader of the Iroquois or other tribes. At numerous points he suggests that the early allegiance of different tribes to the British was based on lavish gifts, and to the French was based on the comfortable laissez-faire relationship that the French had with their Indian allies.

What the British had going for them is that they brought their women with them and built families. They increased and multiplied. The French came as traders and went home. The imbalance of population meant that the British were favored in the contest between British and French.

In the end, the French and Indian wars - the Seven Years War - left Europe pretty much the way it started. But it made Britain lord of North America, established the British Navy as preeminent, and created bases for the British - for example, in India - that became the cornerstones of the British Empire. Pitt, and not George II, understood what was going to be important in the decades ahead.

The problem for the British after the dust settled is that the wars were costly and had to paid for and, many thought, why not make the colonies pay for their own defense?  The Stamp Act imposed duties on imported goods. To which Benjamin Franklin suggested that the new fashion would be "to wear their old clothes over again." Pitt in 1766 succeeded in having it repealed. The Quartering Act billeted British soldiers on the homes of American colonists and the New York legislature voted to nullify it. The British were "aghast".

George III was "contemptuous" of the colonials. Pitt's chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townsend, seeing Pitt ailing, moved ahead to do the king's bidding and imposed new taxes on imports into the colonies of glass, lead, paints, paper and... tea.

The last straw were the "Intolerable Acts", of which the Quebec Act of 1774 appears to Borneman as the most significant. It granted territory north of the Ohio river to the British colony at Quebec. George Washington had claimed these lands for Virginia in 1753 and in 1763 they were nominally marked as an Indian reserve, while several states had their eye on them for purposes of westward expansion.  The Acts also enacted reprisals for the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor.

All this came to a head on April 18, in 1775, when two lanterns were hung in the steeple of Boston's old North Church and their beams sent messengers riding toward Lexington and Concord.

This is a fascinating book and its 400 pages read like a thriller.