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1 Prelude: The Birth of the Second America As one of the founders, John Adams, often remarked, the revolution that brought forth the first independent state in the Western Hemisphere began in the hearts and minds of the people before the first shot was fired. It had begun as protest—a welling up of emotions and outrage over the determination of a generation of British leaders to impose order on the vast domain of inland North America that had been the empire’s reward for its victory over France in the last colonial war. That conflict, remembered in the Atlantic colonies as the French and Indian War, had begun in 1754 not in Europe but in the Ohio country, and the instigators had been a British governor in cahoots with opportunistic Virginia land speculators. To reconnoiter the region they had dispatched an equally ambitious young second lieutenant in the militia , George Washington. It was his first command, and the effort resulted in a humiliating defeat. But in that embarrassment to his pride he acquired a healthy respect for the nature of war in the backcountry. The following year, a much larger British force under General Edward Braddock would suffer an even more resounding loss to a much smaller force. From that experience, the British vowed to finish off the French empire in North America and in victory to guarantee the security of its Atlantic seaboard colonies and, they naively believed, gain the unending gratitude and loyalty of their peoples. Within five years the British avenged those setbacks in the transAppalachian region, and when the Spanish foolishly entered the war on the side of their French enemy, London exacted yet another stupendous victory with the seizure of the port of Havana in 1762. During the ten-month occupation , the British opened the port to merchants and traders, who dazzled the Cubans with consumer goods, staples, and tools. British traders brought in ten thousand slaves. A fourth of the occupation force consisted of North Americans. The encounter between Cubans and North Americans in this occupation promoted ties that persisted into the nineteenth century and inspired 2 america and the americas successive generations of rebellious Cubans with beliefs that North Americans were kindred spirits. At the settling up of territorial rewards, however, the losers appeared to benefit more than the victor. France willingly conceded its North American territory east of the Mississippi but regained the infinitely more valuable sugar islands of St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Spain in turn gave up the Floridas to the British in order to recover its vital port of Havana, and to repay their commitment the French turned over to Spain the port of New Orleans and most of Louisiana west of the Mississippi. What occurred in the aftermath of the British triumph proved to be a turning point in the history of North America and the future of the Western hemisphere . Indians of the Ohio country—a people accustomed to dealing with Europeans as equals—correctly sensed that the defeat of their French ally would only worsen their condition. Loosely united under the leadership of Pontiac, they rebelled. In London, British officials now faced a quandary. To avoid yet another costly campaign, they attempted to mollify the Indians with a stopgap measure—the Proclamation of 1763—aimed at restoring the profitable Indian trade and at the same time stemming the veritable flood of white settlers pouring through the Appalachian passes into the Ohio country. It proved to be a rational but costly calculation. These presumably loyal Britons had been enthusiastic participants in the war against the French enemy, but they viewed the barriers posed by the Proclamation as a denial of their claims to Ohio country lands. Some of them were newcomers, part of the migration of ethnically diverse Britons and Europeans who left the motherland to “make” America. In an era when European philosophers of the Enlightenment largely disdained their countrymen in the New World as inferior and were beginning to praise its native inhabitants as “noble savages,” these newcomers clung instinctively to notions of “natural liberty.” They wanted land, and in their frustration they spoke more and more of Indians in starkly harsh terms. They understood abstractions such as freedom, liberty, progress, and nation in racial terms. And guarantee of their security conditioned their loyalty to government. British imperial policy had run afoul of sentiments and passions far more formidable than any momentary sense of pride in the colonial contribution to the victory over France...

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