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      These incidents were triggers, symptoms of a deeper unrest; and the Quebec Act, though it neutralized Canada, caused a furore in the American colonies. Recognition of Catholicism, associated as it was with the excesses of the Spanish colonizers to the south and the French alliances with native tribes whose cruelty in war bore no relation to European humanism (at least in theory), sparked panic, and there was outrage at the annexation of the lands south of the Great Lakes which, the Americans had assumed, would soon be theirs to settle. A new Congress was called, in Philadelphia, in September 1774 to decide on a course of action.

      America was rich: Britain depended on it not only for luxuries like tobacco but also for timber for masts for the ships of the Royal Navy. Thus one logical line to take was to impose a trade boycott on Britain and its other colonies. Britain could not retaliate in the same way because although she exported a variety of finished goods to the Thirteen Colonies nothing she could offer was indispensable to them. But the cautious deliberations of Congress were quickly overtaken by men who wanted to take a much more radical course of action. British colonial governors were stranded, British executives were simply ignored and had not sufficient military backup to enforce their demands, and during 1775 actual power began to slip increasingly into the hands of what were alarmingly looking more and more like rebels. On neither side was there unity. Many Americans wished to remain within the British Empire, and many Britons supported independence. Either way, whether or not anticipated with dismay by many on both sides of the Atlantic, war seemed, and indeed was, inevitable.

      Britain was still recovering financially from the Seven Years’ War and did not relish the cost of sending a large army so far overseas and then supplying it. The Americans in general were more bullish, but the rebels faced at worst an experienced and well-honed military and naval power with more than the potential to crush them and make sure they never rose again. The Americans only had groups of militias to oppose them, though Congress moved in the summer of 1775 to establish a standing army, and engaged George Washington, forty-three years old and a veteran of battles with the French during the Seven Years’ War, to organize and lead it. Black Americans fought on both sides. Those who managed to escape slavery and sided with the British were promised their freedom in return; a promise which in the event the British were unable to fulfil.

      Skirmishes and pitched battles took place during 1775, especially around Boston, and late in the year the Americans tried unsuccessfully to invade Canada. They remained confident in their cause, however, and as early as 1776 made their Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia.

      The war continued unresolved until 1778, when the French, who were still smarting from the loss of Canada, signed a treaty with the colonial forces, by now fielding near-professional armies under Washington, and also adept at guerrilla techniques unfamiliar to their British counterparts. Spain joined the revolutionary alliance a year later, but held back from open support of American independence, having its own South American colonies to consider. The Dutch also joined in 1780, sharing with Spain and France a desire to see Britain curbed as a world power. The cooperation of these countries weakened Britain’s dominance at sea, and with many at home opposed to this wasteful and expensive conflict with a people who were perceived as countrymen fighting in a just cause, who should be allies and trading partners, not enemies, British resolve faltered.

      HAVING THE NORTH AMERICANS AS PARTNERS WAS FAR MORE PROFITABLE THAN HAVING TO FUND THEM AS COLONISTS.

      In early September 1781 the French defeated the British in a naval battle at Chesapeake, cutting off supplies to Lord Cornwallis’s land forces. Seizing the opportunity, Washington moved his army from New York and besieged Cornwallis at Yorktown. Cornwallis, the vanquisher of Tipu Sultan, but never a supporter of the taxes imposed by Westminster on the Americans, surrendered in October.

      The war went on, but effectively it was over. Political support for the war crashed after the defeat, Lord North, the Prime Minister, resigned, and in April Parliament voted to cease hostilities. Although the articles of peace were not formally signed until the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the war was over. The British left the few Indian allies they had in the lurch, signing over their lands, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, to the newly formed United States of America; and settled down to an amenable trade relationship with their new ally, soon finding that having the North Americans as partners was far more profitable than having to fund them as colonists.

      The British were not the only ones to treat badly those for whom they had implicitly taken responsibility. This chapter should not close without telling the story of Toussaint Louverture.

      In the wake of the French Revolution, in 1792, the new National Assembly declared that all blacks and mulattos in France and its colonies should have the same political rights as the whites. This did not please the rich sugar-planters of places like Saint-Domingue, who had already decided that the island would be better off if it left France and joined Britain. This proposal pleased Britain, but there had to be some very delicate and secret diplomatic negotiation to make sure she got what she wanted. The French revolutionaries were touchy and belligerent, and had to be handled with care. But the British were pleased to be able to pay back the French in a small way for the aid they had given to the Americans a few years earlier, and glad of the extra sugar revenue, so they garrisoned Saint-Domingue. The troops were soon succumbing to tropical disease and fearful boredom.

      Nobody considered that the slaves of the island might play a role themselves, and when in 1794 the French government declared that all slaves should be free, they rose against the British under Louverture, a freeman and former coachman who was already a revolutionary leader, and kicked them out. By 1798, at the age of fifty-two, Louverture was effective ruler of the island, though he remained passionately attached to France and to the ideals of its revolution. However, times were changing in the mother country. Late in 1799, modern Europe’s first major dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, effectively took over the country which he was, through the next fifteen years, to sacrifice on the altar of his own ambition.

      A NEW EXTENSION TO THE EMPIRE PRESENTED ITSELF, JUST AS ANOTHER PART WAS FALLING AWAY.

      In Saint-Domingue, Louverture drafted a constitution that made him governor general for life with near absolute powers. There was no provision for a French official, because Louverture thought himself Frenchman enough. Bonaparte appeared to accept Louverture’s professions of loyalty, and confirmed his appointment, but in fact he wanted to make Saint-Domingue a profitable colony, and to reinstate slavery to do so.

      Bonaparte was conveniently forgetting that, had it not been for Louverture, Saint-Domingue would no longer have belonged to France in the first place.

      The French dictator then sent a task force under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, to regain control of the island. Leclerc landed in January and immediately moved against Louverture. The battle raged for several months, but some of Louverture’s brigades defected, as did former allies on the island, and defeat loomed. On 7 May 1802, Louverture signed a treaty with the French, on condition that there would be no return to slavery, and retired to his farm, but three weeks later, on the pretext that he was plotting an uprising, Leclerc seized Louverture, put him on board a warship, and sent him to France. On the deck of the ship the Governor General declared: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in St-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and deep.’

      Louverture reached France two months later. In August, he was sent to a castle high up in the Alps, a cold and bleak place deliberately chosen for its qualities, where he was put on a starvation diet and subjected to lengthy interrogations. ‘On 27 April 1803 he was found sitting by the fireplace, his hands resting on his knees, his head slightly bent, dead. According to one account, the rats had gnawed at his feet. He was thrown into a common grave.’

      There is also a footnote to this chapter. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, Britain no longer had anywhere to transport its convicts and other undesirables, though immigration to the United States still boomed as the burgeoning new country needed peopling as it ploughed westwards, sweeping, as is the way of all colonizers, the local residents aside. Fortunately for Britain, in 1770 Captain James Cook, whom we met briefly at the side of Major General Wolfe before the battle for Quebec, reached the south-eastern shores of Australia, deftly assisted

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