The debt owed to France by the American Revolutionaries

On 19^th October 1781 the War of the American Revolution ended, to all intents and purposes, when General Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown.  However, the American rebels needed a substantial amount of help from the French before this was possible.

The war had been fought for six years, during which the British had always been able to rely on their command of the sea to switch troops relatively rapidly from north to south and vice versa. Without a fleet, the Americans were reduced to forced marches on land, which was a slow and exhausting process.

However, the rebels had a powerful ally, namely France, which did have a fleet that could be used strategically to help the Americans. It was the use of this fleet that turned the tide (pardon the pun) at Yorktown.

Washington’s troops were at New York while the British were in Virginia. However, the French, under Admiral de Grasse, were in the West Indies and offered to sail north towards Chesapeake Bay. If the British could be isolated there, without support from the sea, there was every chance that they could be defeated.

Washington therefore led a joint American/French army south from New York at the same time that the French fleet was moving north. Another American force, under General Lafayette, also moved towards Virginia.  When the French fleet, which was carrying 3,000 extra troops and siege artillery, drove off a British fleet near Chesapeake Bay, the way was open for an assault on Yorktown.

It did not take long for General Cornwallis to realise that his position was hopeless, and he duly surrendered.

The fact remains, despite all the subsequent hype and flag-waving, that without a substantial amount of French help, Washington would not have been able to drive the British out of North America. Not only did he depend on the timely intervention of French naval power, but his own army at Yorktown was around 50% French.

The American Revolution was seen by France as a way of getting their own back for defeat in the Seven Years War, and American independence was therefore a side issue as far as they were concerned. Victory at Yorktown was revenge for defeat at Montreal and in India, where the British had imposed their imperial will.

Even so, it does seem unlikely that the Revolutionary War would have resulted in British victory had it continued for much longer. History has shown that it is very difficult for a colonial power to maintain its grip when the people in the colony in question are determined to break away. The Americans were convinced that the time was right for them to be independent, and the British were foolish to try to stand in their way. Whether all the reasons advanced by the colonists for so doing really stand up to scrutiny is another matter (“No taxation without representation” for example), but independence would have come soon enough.

However, I wonder how much credit is given in school classes in the United States today to the essential part played in the American Revolution by France under King Louis XVI, who would soon lose his head after resisting the revolutionary fervour of his own people?

© John Welford

The Boston Tea Party, 1773

16^th December 1773 was the day of the “Boston Tea Party”, which is generally regarded as the opening move of the American Revolution.

It cannot be denied that the British government mishandled the colonial problems that it faced. In short, the colonies were costing more to administer and protect than they were producing in benefit for the home country. When the Seven Years War ended in 1763 the British were faced with having to maintain a standing army in the American colonies that was being paid for by taxing their own population to the hilt. The colonies had to be made to pay their own way.

The methods that the British government used to achieve this end may have seemed logical at the time but they did not go down well with the colonists who were far more concerned about their own situation than the bigger picture of the British Empire – naturally enough. The colonists saw no reason why they should pay any sort of tax to the home country, but the British parliament, equally logically, saw no reason why the colonists should expect a free ride at Britain’s expense.

A whole series of financial impositions was made on the colonies, of which the duty on tea was only one. A complicating factor was that the company that controlled Britain’s trade in tea, the British East India Company, had been given permission to send tea to the colonies tax free and charge what they wanted for it rather than going through a middleman.

This move was resented by the colonists, who saw it as a move to establish a trade monopoly, despite the fact that the tea that was being delivered to Boston in December 1773 would have been offered for sale at a lower price than previously, due to the relaxation of the full duties that would otherwise be paid, although there was a still a residual duty. It was the very fact that some duty was still payable that offended the Bostonians, because the principle was thus established that the British government had the right to levy charges on the colonists.

The whole issue of “no taxation without representation” was something of a smokescreen, because it ignored the fact that what was at issue here were duties and not taxes. It made no sense to demand seats in the parliament of a country that levied import duties on the purchasers of its goods, because this would apply to the citizens of any country doing the importing, but this was not an argument that would have cut much ice with the American colonists for whom the tea issue was the final straw.

As it was, an organised mob of about 60 Boston citizens, led by Samuel Adams, dressed themselves as Mohawks – to add an element of theatre to the proceedings – and boarded three ships in Boston Harbour to tip 342 tea chests overboard.

The British response to the incident was “overboard” in another sense, in that repressive measures were taken to force the rioters to pay for the lost tea. It was this attempt to punish the colonists of Massachusetts that really lit the fuse that would lead to revolution, rather than the Tea Party itself.

© John Welford