The Seven Years' War: A Provincial's View.

Anderson, Fred

It would be hard to overstate my gratitude to the authors of these essays. However daunting it may be to learn what rigorous critics think of one's work, no author could hope for more careful, thoughtful treatment than Crucible of War received at their hands. Nor, I hasten to add, could anyone hope to see critical judgments expressed with greater courtesy. I am indebted to them all, and particularly to Ian Steele for organizing their reviews into this Forum and offering me a chance to respond.

Let me begin by declining to argue with the substance of their analysis. It would be impossible, of course, not to want to agree with Gregory Dowd, P.J. Marshall, and John Shy, who evaluated the book in such gratifyingly positive ways; yet I must also admit that Jay Cassel and Jonathan Dull, who found the book disappointing, are both entirely justified in calling me to account for having slighted the French empire and its Canadian subjects. It is important to note, however, that even those best disposed toward it are at least as smack by what I left out -- women and slaves and important Indian groups, the diplomatic and strategic role of Spain, and long-run developments in British political culture, to name a few -- as by what I included. For these omissions they deserve an explanation; and that, in turn, has three dimensions. One of these necessitates an uncomfortable confession, so it seems best to start there.

A substantial part of my narrative's incompleteness can be traced to one of my more prominent intellectual shortcomings, which the reviewers were too polite to name:(1) functional monolingualism. While with a dictionary and a good deal of time I can interpret a limited range of materials in French and German, I have nothing like the capacity to master any sizable range of sources, let alone a whole foreign-language historiography. The fact that many American historians share my handicap only tends to support the contention that we are too often an insular lot, prone to take exceptionalist judgments about our nation's history at face value. Ironically, it was in the hope of writing a less-exceptionalist narrative of American history that I undertook Crucible of War; which leads me to the second reason for my book's limitations, its larger conceptual frame.

The ordinary textbook version of American history posits two essential turning points: the Revolution and the Civil War. What comes before the Revolution typically appears as prelude, a long colonial climb toward nationhood. Attaining Independence requires a sharp break with the empire -- a war of liberation -- and occasions the establishment of republican government. Unfortunately, the institutions on which that government rests only partially fulfill the political ideals of equality, liberty, and representation that motivated resistance to British rule, and leave unresolved the great ideological problems of citizenship and slavery. It takes a second war of liberation, the Civil War, to resolve those contradictions. Thereafter American history largely consists of the step-by-step extension of freedom and equality that put the republic's principles into practice. This grand narrative therefore posits a movement from empire to republic and hinges on ideological factors. Oddly, for a story that makes two great military conflicts its central events, it also portrays the thrust of American national development as essentially peaceable in character. Thus the "westward expansion" that might well be understood as the conquest and subordination of the continent's previous inhabitants is still explained as the virtually inevitable, and ultimately beneficial, incorporation of the central part of North America into the sphere of freedom, democracy, and equal rights.

Because I was (and am) convinced that the Revolution can also be understood as a consequence of the Seven Years' War that preceded it, I wanted to take that conflict and its aftermath as a starting-point for a narrative that would assign a central role to imperial ambition. If events in the last half of the eighteenth century can be seen as a protracted Anglophone attempt to control the Ohio Valley, and hence to open the interior of the continent to colonization, the origins of the United States appear in a different light than the one cast by the conventional scheme. In this alternative account, the essential movement is not from empire through revolution to republic, but from empire through revolution to republic -- and to a new, more successful form of empire. Here the Revolution is not solely significant in that it creates a politically viable regime based on notions of popular sovereignty, for it also creates a viable imperial order -- one that rests on the radical proposition that an "empire of liberty" can exist and prosper with no powerful metropolitan authority to define its purposes and character. In this scheme empire and conquest become as central to American history, political culture, and identity as the republican values of liberty and equality; and warfare becomes as much an engine of American development as demographic or economic growth.

This understanding of a Janus-faced American history furnished the starting-point of my attempt to create a "synthetic narrative," a genre that Andrew Cayton and I described in a 1993 essay as one in which an argument synthesizing otherwise fragmented monographs and articles defines the trajectory of a plot (or, more accurately, the central axis of numerous interrelated plot lines), and in which content governs form.(2) In retrospect it is clear that I set out to write with two unexamined assumptions in mind, and that these would decisively influence the book. First, I thought that the story could be told on a human scale, so that not just great historical forces but the actions, motives, and characters of individual actors could be seen to shape outcomes; second, I believed that I would be able to encompass events from the end of King George's War (1748) through the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the Treaty of Greenville (1794-95) in a single volume. The first assumption undermined the second, and shaped a book that ultimately bore little resemblance to the one I had intended.

I first noted the consequences of my choice of scale when the characters began to exert an unexpected influence over the story, and the manuscript began swelling to an alarming size. Originally the book I then called Death and Taxes began with three long chapters that included an account of the functioning of the Atlantic economic system; an overview of the societies, political systems, cultures, and intercultural relations of eastern North America; a detailed survey of British imperial administration from the appointment of Lord Halifax as President of the Board of Trade through the Albany Congress in 1754; and a discussion of the activities of Indian traders and land-speculating groups in Britain's colonies. With notes, this immense prolegomenon comprised nearly two hundred manuscript pages and first began to inch forward when Washington and Tanaghrisson paid their visit to Legardeur de Saint-Pierre at Fort LeBoeuf in 1753. It only really began to move along with the next year's encounter between Washington and Tanaghrisson's force and that of the unfortunate Ensign Jumonville -- and then there seemed to be no stopping it.

Curiously, Washington's centrality to the story dawned on me only as I was assembling materials on the Forbes expedition in preparation for writing a chapter on the diplomatic and military developments of 1758. That made it uncomfortably clear that no matter how important the prologue had been to me as a means of mapping out the structures within which the story moved, it was important only to me, and would probably prove impassable to any reader other than the most determined graduate student. Thus I decided to begin in medias res, with the massacre at Jumonville's Glen and to incorporate contextual material only as it became necessary for the reader to understand whatever action was at hand.

The restructuring and rewriting that followed turned the book from a kind of chronologically-ordered encyclopedia into an actual story, and required me to submerge explicitly analytical passages in descriptions of characters and their actions. That allowed an assortment of secondary figures -- George Croghan, for one -- to shoulder their way into roles more prominent than I had intended them to play. Meanwhile, because I was now trying to show, rather than merely to tell, my imagined audience what was going on, the story-lines grew more complex and densely interrelated, and the manuscript steadily expanded. By the time I had finished describing the annus mirabilis 1759, it was evident that even discarding my vast static prologue would not enable me to write a one-volume account spanning the years I had intended, at the human scale I had chosen. Forced to decide between changing the scale and changing the limits of my story, I opted to narrow its bounds, and began to think of taking two volumes to bring it to completion.

Only when I had brought the story down to the resolution of the Townshend Acts controversy and the manuscript was assuming Leviathan-like dimensions did I realize that I would have to end the first volume not with the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1775, but with the conclusion of the Stamp Act crisis. While this gave my story a less satisfying dramatic arc, it still allowed me to make the points I had thought essential about the connections between the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, the implementation of metropolitan reforms in imperial rule, the eruption of Pontiac's Rebellion, and the events to which historians ordinarily trace the beginnings of revolutionary resistance. But choosing an end-point for a story, of course, means that one also chooses the story's central meaning and significance; and that compelled me (at last) to confront the practical limits of narration as a tool for synthesis. Rather than the essentially unlimited means of synthesizing scholarship I had hoped it would afford, I now realized that a narratively-emplotted argument succeeded only insofar as that argument could be expressed chronologically.

The third factor limiting my treatment of the Seven Years' War and its aftermath therefore proved to be Narrative itself. Within the larger empire-to-revolution-to-empire scheme that had structured my thinking, certain factors of great importance would have come up for inclusion in phases of development that now lay beyond my reach. The issue of political ideology offers a case in point. The motives I had seen as essential to understanding the war and its aftermath largely centred on material ambitions and the quest for power, as expressed in the desire of speculators to acquire control over land, the intent of military leaders and soldiers to destroy their enemies, the need of politicians and diplomats to secure the interests of the governments or groups they represent, and so forth. Insofar as American colonists willingly participated in the war, they participated in that quest and expected to share in the rewards that followed from success, for they regarded themselves as partners in constructing a greater British empire. Only when metropolitan authorities inaugurated their post-war reforms did the colonists understand their position in the empire as a subordinated one. Then they resisted.

The persistence of post-war British governments in seeking to extend metropolitan authority drove the colonists to seek common ground as they had never been required to do before, and republican political ideology eventually furnished the basis for building a coalition of resistance across provincial boundaries. This was, however, a process that progressed by stages, as republican values were increasingly articulated and used to explain the actions of the various ministers to the political community of the colonies. In the narrative scheme I had followed, ideological factors first become important in the Stamp Act crisis, but only in a general and comparatively unorganized way amidst violent movement and uncoordinated resistance. The point at which ideology acquires a more generally visible role as a motivator, and the point at which the narrative might logically pause for a full discussion of its significance, would come (and indeed did come, in the draft) with resistance to the Townshend Acts. Characterized in this way, the years from 1767 through 1770 were a period of clarification in which colonists concerned about the potential loss of liberty sought to explain to themselves what was at stake, and to make those explanations the basis of a nonimportation movement. This prolonged discussion of rights and resistance also produced the first division of colonial political communities into the factions called Whig and Tory; and that, of course, leads to the next phase of the story's development. Once the universalizing rhetoric of rights began to illuminate those elements of society and culture -- the subordinated place of slaves and blacks and women, for example -- at odds with the emerging political culture, the narrative moment would have arrived to discuss groups that had largely been absent from the story of the imperial war, but who would become more significant to the story of the Revolution.

As this example suggests, narration depends on chronology, and chronology dictates both the pace and the place at which themes can be introduced and explained. The introduction of each successive plot element adds another storyline to follow. In this way, the synthetic narrative becomes incrementally more complex as it lengthens, and the decision to conclude the story limits the author's ability to depict the full complexity of those developments currently in progress that will culminate somewhere beyond the end-point. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, therefore, I never intended to deny the importance of ideology as a causal factor in the growth of resistance to British power, much less to ignore the existence or minimize the significance of women, African-Americans, and slaves. The larger story, of which the present book is only the beginning, has them all. But inasmuch as narratives, no matter how complex, must be related in essentially linear and time-bound ways, and insofar as stories engage readers best when the author shows rather than tells them the significance of the component episodes, would-be synthetic narrators may well find that their syntheses are ultimately less complete than they would have wished. At least that is what I discovered in writing Crucible of War.

Looking back at a project that turned out very differently from the one that I had planned, the degree to which historical narratives are bounded not only by time and argument but by the author's implicit point of view has also become uncomfortably apparent. From the outset I knew that my subject was not the Seven Years' War and its impacts as a whole, but the war and its influence on the Anglo-American political community in relation to the Indian peoples with whom the Anglo-Americans dealt. I therefore always knew, at some level, that I could never treat French and Canadian topics (much less the German, Austrian, Spanish, and subcontinental Indian elements of the larger story) as fully as British and American ones. But these five reviewers have shown me that my point of view remained anchored in colonial British America to a degree even greater than I had anticipated. So while my story took account of metropolitan and indigenous perspectives as well as colonial ones, in the end it best reflected the world as Anglo-American colonists saw it -- and especially as it appeared to those colonists who lived on, or concerned themselves with, the contested western and northern marches of British America. Mine remains at its heart a provincial's view of a great war, and a provincial's view of the empire that emerged triumphant. Any merit it may have must reside in whatever this limited story contributes to our ability to understand the motives and actions and views of those provincials who transmuted their own circumscribed views into a movement that broke apart one empire and raised on its ruins another, which would soon incorporate so much of a previously unconquered continent.

University of Colorado at Boulder

(1) Not a universally-shared characteristic among my critics. See, for example, T. Slaughter, "On the Way to the Revolution," Washington Post Book World, 2 July 2000, X-04.

(2) "The Problem of Fragmentation and the Prospects for Synthesis in Early American Social History," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 50 (September 1993), 299-310.