Patriotism may seem to be a straightforward concept, but in the Age of the American Revolution, it was in fact rather complicated. In his famous Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson originally defined “patriot” simply as “one whose ruling passion is the love of his country.” In 1775, however, Dr. Johnson added a secondary definition to the new edition: “a factious disturber of the government.” This latter type is likely what Dr. Johnson had in mind when he told James Boswell that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” The Tory Johnson certainly had no problems with those who loved their country. But he did take issue with self-proclaimed Patriots who struggled, on both sides of the Atlantic, for America’s right not to be taxed without representation. As he wrote in The Patriot (1774): “That man … is no patriot, who justifies the ridiculous claims of American usurpation; who endeavours to deprive the nation of its natural and lawful authority over its own colonies.” In other words, “patriotism” had become a contested concept.
Amy Watson’s new book, Patriots Before Revolution, explores the role of Patriotism in the British Atlantic world in the fifty-year run-up to the American crisis that became the American Revolution. It contributes to the growing body of literature on the meaning of Patriotism in the eighteenth century. The book is based on a series of connected case studies, beginning in England in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession of 1714 and finishing, via Scotland, Georgia, and New York, with Patriot resistance to the Stamp Act in the 1760s. In a similar vein to recent historiography pioneered by Steven Pincus, Watson shows that Patriotism was a specific ideology with roots in British politics that migrated to colonial America.
Watson argues that Patriotism was not just a facet of British eighteenth-century party politics but also a transatlantic political party with an organization. This is largely a matter of definition, and it is important to note that eighteenth-century parties were much looser than modern ones. In her story, the Patriots emerged as a party opposed to the Court Whig Sir Robert Walpole, who led the British government between 1721 and 1742. The original opposition Whigs in the Patriot group shared a common interest in America and its trade. According to Watson, the Patriots were united in seeking to reform the British empire, making it “militant, expansionist, confederal, and free.” In other words, they wanted the empire to be stronger and more active, while leaving its settlers alone in their enjoyment of constitutional liberties. This turned out to be a rather difficult balancing act.
Watson’s book makes several substantial contributions. It helps to restore the importance of partisan conflict as being central to British eighteenth-century politics, in contrast to J. H. Plumb’s paradigm of the “growth of political stability.” And rather than “salutary neglect,” the book shows that empire was a vital part of British partisan politics. More specifically, it demonstrates the significance of this partisan conflict for the pre-history of the American Revolution. As Watson notes in the introduction: “Only rarely do histories of the American Revolution begin before the year 1763.” But, as she reveals, the long-term history of Patriot politics informed the American crisis in the 1760s.
The British Patriots were not revolutionaries but rather imperialists. However, Watson is correct to state that American revolutionaries who adopted the label “Patriot” identified themselves with British “Patriots” such as John Wilkes. As she aptly puts it, “the Stamp Act’s repeal was both transatlantic Patriotism’s greatest victory and its last gasp.” But as it weakened as a British force after the Stamp Act crisis, it flourished in the thirteen colonies, where it managed to unite southerners such as Thomas Jefferson with northerners such as John Adams.
Where’s the party?
Yet, one must consider whether the Patriots really were a transatlantic political party, or something else. Most historians have been content to call it an ideology, and Watson herself sometimes, with good reason, calls it a movement. She is right that we should not be misled by the general complaints against party politics into thinking that there were no parties. This was rather a sign that party politics was rife. But what do we gain by focusing on the Patriot party as opposed to opposition Whigs? Indeed, on Watson’s evidence, their leader William Pulteney in the 1720s and 1730s seemed clear that his “party” proceeded on what he called “Whig principles.”
The Country party platform represented an ambition to unite all opposition parties in defense of constitutional liberties and the people.
As Watson rightly highlights, party in the eighteenth-century sense was often taken to be a group of political actors held together by a set of beliefs rather than organization. But organization was not irrelevant, because party could also imply a smaller political group, often motivated by power or interest. This meant that party could refer to one of the traditional parties, the Whigs and the Tories, as well as smaller factions, often congregating around a prominent parliamentary speaker, a great landowner, or several noble families. In one of these loose senses, the Patriots could be seen to have been a political party, though one with little in common with modern parliamentary parties. But Watson goes further by saying that “the Patriots had higher levels of organization than scholarship has previously recognized, including a dedicated party leadership, a coherent ideological platform, active social clubs, and close ties to city corporations and mercantile associations.” These arguments are well-made and supported by an astonishing amount and range of archival research. Nevertheless, by reason of their boldness, such arguments warrant close examination.
Patriot Ideology
Though “patriot” was sometimes used as a generic term for opposition politician, it is evident that Patriotism did consist of an ideology, or at least a set of principles. But what were they? The ideological polarity as presented in the book focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on empire and political economy. What singled out the Patriots’ economic and imperial agenda, according to Watson, was that they regarded Britain’s colonies as markets for manufactured goods, whereas their opponents saw them as sources of agricultural products and natural resources. This sounds somewhat puzzling as, in trade, one market’s exports pay for its imports (at least in the long term), and it would have been pointless to send manufactured goods to markets that had nothing to sell in return (especially as the Navigation Acts prevented open trade, and the colonies would have had no way to finance a trade deficit). Considering the state of economic development in the eighteenth century, there could not have been any conflict over whether Britain’s manufactured goods should be exchanged for agricultural products and natural resources in the empire, and the real disagreement concerned how manufacturing and trade were to be encouraged, what markets should be targeted, and how they should be protected. This is effectively shown in the fine chapter on Georgia, established by the British general James Oglethorpe as a “Patriot colony.”
To understand the Patriot principles fully, we need to bring in another “party” that is largely, though not entirely, missing from the scene, namely the Country party. In its original, seventeenth-century context, “Country” was sometimes used interchangeably with “Patriot.” It was derived from “county” and sprang from the tension between central government and the peripheries, as well as between the court and the opposition in parliament. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, the Country party platform represented an ambition to unite all opposition parties in defense of constitutional liberties and the people in opposition to an increasingly centralized, expensive, and allegedly corrupt government. This Country party ideology was often synonymous with “Patriotism.”
In this book, the Country Journal, or the Craftsman, is claimed as a Patriot journal, but it was a “Country party” venture intended to unite opposition Whigs and Tories. The Craftsman’s co-founder and leading writer, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, was a Tory who popularized the “Patriot label” with his publications A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism and The Idea of a Patriot King, written in the late 1730s and published in the 1740s. But prior to this, Bolingbroke promoted the Country party as an opposition party in the pages of the Craftsman. But to his chagrin, many Tories and opposition Whigs continued to view the Country party as an occasional bipartisan platform rather than a cohesive party. On church matters, opposition Whigs continued to speak and vote with government Whigs against the Tories, undermining the possibility of an opposition coalition. In any case, the connections between the Country party tradition and Patriotism, as well as those between the Rage of Party and the age of Walpole, could have been further explored in this fine book.
Party Leadership
According to Watson, William Pitt the Elder was the leader of the Patriot party during the Seven Years’ War. Indeed, he was often, and appropriately, described as a Patriot minister. But his own career does not reveal much interest in party organization over and above his reliance on lieutenants such as the “West-Indian” William Beckford to rally support. For Pitt, Patriotism seems to have been closer to principled independence than party solidarity, and indeed a willingness to appeal to a coalition of parties along Bolingbrokean lines. When the Elder Pitt led the government during the Seven Years’ War, he relied on the support of the Tories and, from 1757, on the Old Corps of Whigs (which would have been anathema to many earlier Patriots). As the leader of the government, Pitt had to compromise with the king (who was also Elector of the German state Hanover) and commit the government to financing warfare on continental Europe, alongside the imperial strategy favored by the Patriots. The Patriot historian Catharine Macaulay would later comment on Pitt’s mixed record:
The late Earl of Chatham [i.e. the Elder Pitt] whose splendid administration makes a capital figure in the annals of this country, is universally called the minister of the people; but whoever accurately traces the steps by which this great statesman acquired the necessary department in power to render his talents in any extent useful to his country, will find that Mr. Pitt, instead of having been forced on the crown by the voice of a free people, either in their collective or representative capacity, was, as a necessary prelude to his being appointed to the office of prime minister, obliged to sacrifice to the prejudices of the sovereign [George II] all those popular principles which had graced his parliamentary harangues for the series of many years, and which had raised him to the highest pitch of public favour and esteem.
Beyond the chronology of the book, it is worth mentioning that Pitt’s second administration in 1766–68, after he had been elevated to the earldom of Chatham, was a coalition of parties and motley independents, and ridiculed for this reason by the party man Edmund Burke in his Speech on American Taxation (1774):
[Chatham] made an administration so checkered and speckled, he put together a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed, a cabinet so variously inlaid, such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement—here a bit of black stone and there a bit of white, patriots and courtiers, king’s friends and republicans, Whigs and Tories, treacherous friends and open enemies—that it was, indeed, a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand on. The colleagues whom he had assorted at the same boards stared at each other, and were obliged to ask—‘Sir, your name?’
As the Earl of Chatham, the Elder Pitt was a diminished figure, who suffered from both mental and physical health issues. Yet he could still be a formidable parliamentary speaker and the main opposition force in Britain alongside Burke’s party, the Rockingham Whigs, during the American Revolutionary War. But the Chathamites were never a party in the same eighteenth-century sense as the Rockingham Whigs. As Pitt’s most loyal follower, the Earl of Shelburne, commented, “[Chatham] thought that he could act to more advantage without the incumbrance of a party.” For several years, the only reliable “Chathamite” followers in the House of Commons were Isaac Barré and John Dunning (Beckford died in 1770). This was hardly a party. Nor did Pitt have any interest in eighteenth-century clubbing; Shelburne described in his memoirs how he “was in the most intimate political habits with him [Chatham] for ten years … without drinking a glass of water in his house or company.” The Elder Pitt’s mantra was the anti-party slogan: “not men, but measures.” And the inheritor of this tradition, Chatham’s son William Pitt the Younger, disclaimed party politics and called himself an independent Whig.
Anti-Partyism
Party was undoubtedly a central theme in eighteenth-century British politics—one may even call it a persistent one. But unlike today, not all parliamentarians were party men. Many were independent backbenchers, who usually supported the king’s government, but were occasionally prepared to go along with Patriot measures, as when a slight majority voted for Dunning’s 1780 motion that “the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”
Not all frontline politicians were party men in the eighteenth century. Robert Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle, and the Marquess of Rockingham certainly were. But the Elder Pitt was not, and the Younger Pitt was arguably not, either, unless having political friends and followers is sufficient as a criterion. We must therefore be prepared to confront the fact that William Pitt the Elder may have been the consummate Patriot politician without knowing that he belonged to, let alone led, any party organization known as the Patriots. If we take the ideas and principles of the men and women of the eighteenth century seriously, we need to come to terms with their sometimes-genuine anti-partyism, as well.
These caveats and quibbles notwithstanding, there is no doubt that Patriotism Before Revolution tells us much that is essential about ideology and political strife in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and that it is a must-read for all serious students of British and American history of the period. One of the many highlights of the book is its focus on the eighteenth-century partisan press, and its centrality for organized politics is usefully highlighted. But first and foremost, Watson’s study is a triumph of original archival research.