Resentment and Revolution

Press gangs forcing unsuspecting colonials to serve in the Royal Navy, British arrogance and indifference to provincial pleas, and numerous British military blunders combined with the staggering loss of provincial blood and treasure generated enormous strain between Great Britain and its mainland North American colonies. Festering provincial grievances, resentments, and tensions caused by British abuses between 1650 and 1750 "prepared the minds of the colonists for revolution" in the 1770s (p. 2). So runs the argument advanced by J. Revell Carr in Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 1650–1750.

Written in the grand narrative style of Francis Parkman, Carr presents a dramatic popular history of eighteenth-century British imperial conflicts. The book succeeds in bringing to life imperial military campaigns, especially the successful June 1745 expedition against the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Yet in this streamlined, linear history, the crown's subjects living in the British American colonies, harboring their accumulated resentments, march forward, inevitably, toward American independence.

The author, who served as director and president of Mystic Seaport, does not immediately address the colonial wars that comprise the centerpiece of his study. He instead begins with the familiar and, in this retelling, romanticized tale of the founding of England's North American colonies. In the beginning, English transplants to the Chesapeake colonies and the New England plantations "exercised their 'rights' of self-determination and began to develop a distinctive, 'independent' character" (p. 11). Such sweeping generalizations should make serious students of history wary. Legal historians, most notably Mary Sarah Bilder, have recently pointed out how the complicated seventeenth-century English legal system allowed flexibility and innovation. ¹ English adventurers operated within an elastic arrangement. They made full use of their supple system rather than, as Carr implies, whatever particular genius or desire for independence they may have had. There is no mention in Carr's founding chapters of the English West Indian islands, even though these outposts came to have far greater economic and strategic importance than any of the mainland colonies. In an uncomplicated New World, Englishmen, and presumably women too, nurtured independence.

In his early chapters, Carr briefly addresses English "liberties," connecting liberty with a nascent, but distinctive American spirit. "A sense of independence and right of self-governance," Carr writes, "had become cherished components of the emerging American character" (p. 13). Certainly the English cherished their constitution, which protected their "liberties," such as trial by jury and representative government. As the colonists knew very well, their beloved English constitution provided them with a firewall against arbitrary, unjust power. (For this reason, Voltaire celebrated England in his 1733 Letters Concerning the English Nation.) Liberty had to be defended, and generations of English men and women had risen to the occasion when necessary, as did Bostonians and other provincials in 1765 when they tellingly styled themselves "Sons of Liberty." Carr's streamlined discussion of liberty, however, does not delve deeply into the meanings that liberty held in the English Atlantic, and he avoids the conceptual link between liberty and slavery. Yet as David Waldstreicher's Runaway America illustrates, Anglo concepts of liberty cannot be understood apart from the reality of slavery. ² Slavery meant the absence of liberty. In this study, defending revered English "liberties" anticipates the American Revolution rather than being a response to specific episodes when colonists and other Englishmen protested corruption within a system of government they dearly cherished and celebrated. Rather than showing "American character," defending liberty was a thoroughly English reaction.

The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the subsequent imposition of ever greater imperial controls in English America culminated with the creation of the hated Dominion of New England in 1685, the super-sized colony that included all New England and eventually New York and New Jersey. For Carr, the colonial phase of the Glorious Revolution that toppled the Dominion constitutes "the first American revolution" (p. 26). Though the author...