A History of the American People

rate the men in power there. There was arrogance, and arrogance bred mistakes, and obstinacy
meant they were persisted in to the point of idiocy. The root of the trouble was George III, a
young, self confident, ignorant, opinionated, inflexible, and pertinacious man determined to be
an active king, not just in name, like his grandfather George II, but in reality. George III
however, was a sensible man, we aware of his considerable intellectual and constitutional
limitations. He had employed great statesmen, when he could find them, like Sir Robert Walpole
and William Pitt the Elder, who had helped to make Britain the richest and most successful
nation in the world. George III employed second-raters and creatures of his own making, mere
court favorites or men whose sole merit was an ability to manage a corrupt House of Commons.
From 1763 to 1782, by which time the America colonies had been lost, it would be hard to think
of a more dismal succession of nonentities than the men who, as First Lords of the Treasury
(Prime Minister), had charge of Britain's affairs-the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, the Marquis
of Rockingham, the Duke of Grafton and Lord North. And behind them, in key jobs, were other
boobies like Charles Townshend and Lord George Germaine.
This might not have mattered quite so much if the men they face across the Atlantic had been
of ordinary stature, of average competence and character. Unfortunately for Britain-and
fortunately for America-the generation that emerged to lead the colonies into independence was
one of the most remarkable group of men in history-sensible, broad-minded, courageous, usually
well educated, gifted in a variety of ways, mature, and long-sighted, sometimes lit by flashes of
genius. It is rare indeed for a nation to have at its summit a group so variously gifted as
Washington and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison,
and John Adams. And what was particularly providential was the way in which their strengths
and weaknesses compensated each other, so that the group as a whole was infinitely more
formidable than the sum of its parts. They were the Enlightenment made flesh, but an
Enlightenment shorn of its vitiating French intellectual weaknesses of dogmatism,
anticlericalism, moral chaos, and an excessive trust in logic, and buttressed by the English
virtues of pragmatism, fair-mindedness, and honorable loyalty to each other. Moreover, behind
this front rank was a second, and indeed a third, of solid, sensible, able men capable of rising to a
great occasion. In personal qualities, there was a difference as deep as the Atlantic between the
men who led America and Britain during these years, and it told from first to last. Great events in
history are determined by all kinds of factors, but the most important single one is always the
quality of the people in charge; and never was this principle more convincingly demonstrated
than in the struggle for American independence.
Poor quality of British leadership was made evident in the immediate aftermath of the collapse
of French power in Canada by an exercise of power thoroughly alien to the English spirit-social
engineering. Worried by the concentration of French settlers in Nova Scotia, British ministers
tried to round up 10,000 of them and disperse them by force to other British colonies. This was
the kind of thing which normally took place in Tsarist Russia, not on British territory. The
Protestant colonies did not want the papist diaspora. Virginia insisted on sending its allotment,
1,100, to England. Some 3,000 escaped and went to Quebec, where in due course the British
deported them-plus several thousand others-to a reluctant France. The spectacle of these
wretched people being marched about and put into ships by redcoats, then replaced by phalanxes
of Ulster Protestants, Yorkshire Methodists, and bewildered Scotch Highlanders-themselves
marched from ship to inland allotments as though they were conscript members of a military
colony-was repugnant to the established colonists. Might not the British authorities soon start to
shove them around too, as though they were loads of timber or sacks of potatoes?"