ARMED FORCE IN COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA: NEW SPAIN, NEW FRANCE, AND ANGLO-AMERICA

[Professor John Shy, Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America]

 

Military history continues to struggle to make its way within the historical discipline. Professional historians of course find it impossible to ignore the fact or the importance of war, but they are quite able to ignore the military sector of human existence whenever it does not impinge directly on matters of immediate concern, and even when they deal with military questions they give much less attention to the technicalities of the subject than they would, say, to the technical aspects of economic growth, theological disputes, or democratic elections. There continues to be a problem: war is an unpleasant subject, and military affairs do not seem very attractive to just those who make history their profession. And yet they have devoted themselves to the close study of rebellion and revolution, and are now scrutinizing the history of crime and punishment, subjects with perhaps as little intrinsic appeal as armies, navies, and war. The problem obviously goes deep, and I cannot pretend to understand it fully.

 

But one part of the problem seems clear enough, and remediable, because it lies within the zone in which military history is practiced. Most published military history simply does not “connect” with general history, and few military historians make any effort to do so. Too often military historians confine their research to military records, and their search for explanation to military factors, as if the outcome of battle or the life of an army was wholly self-contained, unrelated to environment. The fallacy is too apparent to deserve argument. But the continuing reluctance of so many military historians to bring their work into effective touch with the modern ideal — shared by Marxists and non-Marxists alike — of holistic history, all pieces complexly related to one another and affecting one another, is surprising. What we get instead from too many military historians, aware as they are of the lack of respect among other historians for our specialty, is programmatic pleas for the importance of our subject, cries for new approaches and syntheses that will incorporate the military dimension, but very little actual, substantive work that meets this high standard. Work that effectively integrates military and non-military sectors of life is usually done by scholars who would reject the label “military historian”. What our apathetic and skeptical colleagues need is not programs and preaching, but performance; and it is with this need in mind that I have undertaken the task of this essay: to examine the projection of armed force by European states across the North Atlantic before the technological revolution of the nineteenth century transformed the very nature of both armed force and its projection over long distance.1

 

Superficially the historical projection of military power by England, France, and Spain into North America appears similar. At first, very small increments of armed force, operating beyond effective control of these European governments, were somehow sufficient to establish footholds on the North American continent. By the late seventeenth century, when there began the long series of European wars which shaped interamerican relations from 1689 to 1815, the military structure of English, French, and Spanish North America ap-pears to conform roughly to a common pattern. This pattern was comprised of small garrisons of regular troops stationed at key points, a much larger but much less professional militia recruited from the European colonists themselves, friendly native Americans (Indians) serving as auxiliaries, and more or less regu-lar visitation and protection by warships based in European ports. An additional part of the pattern is chronic discontent with the pattern itself, a discontent ex-pressed both by settlers in America and officials in Europe. These complaints themselves conformed to a pattern: regulars grew lazy and corrupt and were in any event too expensive, the militia was unarmed and untrained and often cowardly, Indians were treacherous and irresponsible, and the warships were seldom present when and where they were needed. By the early eighteenth century, complaints about the military system of colonial North America are so frequent, and proposals for reform so numerous, that a historian can only be reminded of the enormous physical difficulties of projecting military power and governmental control over thousands of miles in an age before steam transportation, electrical communication, and rapid-fire weapons had brought distance and population into a new relationship with armed force and state authority. During that long century of imperial conflict, 1689-1815, mutual inefficiency and weakness did as much to secure the European colonies of North America from external attack as did the skill and courage of their defenders, the strength of their fortresses, or the plans and expenditures of their respective governments.

 

Closer examination, however, reveals profound differences among the three colonial military systems; only a narrow focus on military organization and policy creates the superficial appearance of basic similarity. The main forces that set the American colonial empires on radically divergent military courses were geography, demography, and timing.

 

Spanish entry of the continent in 1519 found a very large, highly developed native population. Recent estimates, based on new, careful research indicate that about 25 million people lived in the vast area that would become New Spain, most of them on the great Mexican-Guatemalan plateau.2 This population, probably because of the “cold-screening” effect of migration from Asia through the Arctic zone and complete isolation for thousands of years, was virtually free of endemic disease. 3 The dominant force in the region was the Aztec empire, a militarized state still in the process of expanding and consolidating its hold on peripheral areas when the Spanish arrived. The Aztec empire, unlike earlier Mexican regimes, depended heavily on armed force, and resistance to its terrorist methods of control generated counterforce among subjected and threatened tribes.4 It was into this state of actual and incipient civil war that the first Spaniards moved. Their tiny armed band was no more than the increment needed to turn Indian rebellion against Aztec rule into civil war and revolution. Although Spanish arms are traditionally credited with the conquest of Mexico and the Az-tec empire, it is clear that Indians defeated Indians, with Spaniards the benefici-ary of the result.5

 

Spaniards could gather the fruits of civil war and military victory in part because of European technology, which was even more frightening than it was lethal, and native American theology, which foretold conquest of Mexico by strangers from the East.6 But the chief factor in Spanish rule was not weaponry but disease. Typhoid, smallpox, measles, and other diseases endemic among Europeans simply destroyed the native population in less than a century, leaving only a million disorganized, demoralized survivors by 1600, when France and England began to establish permanent footholds on the North American continent. Without natural resistance to disease, the native American succumbed not to muskets and armored cavalry, but to conversation and kisses.7

 

Geography completed the real imperial system of New Spain, in which organized armed force would play a surprisingly limited role. The incredible silver deposits at Potosi, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato were dug out by a dying native population, incapable of resistance, and soon by Africans as well. 8 This great Mexican treasure house and charnel house was secured by vast deserts to the northward, by the inaccessibility of its western flank, and by the deadly diseases of the Caribbean coast and the constricted eastern routes to the interior. Veracruz, guarded by San Juan de Ulloa and a small regular garrison, thus blocked access to thousands of square miles of Mexico. More difficult was securing the line of supply and communication to Old Spain. Prevailing winds pushed silver-laden convoys through the Florida channel, and long before France or England could colonize the continent the fortresses of Havana and St. Augustine guarded the one point at which New Spain was truly vulnerable. On the mainland, along a frontier looking northward from St. Augustine, the courage and dedication of Franciscan monks did more than soldiers to bring the Indian tribes of that area under effective Spanish control.9

 

On the eve of permanent French and English colonization of North America, military organization as such played so little part in New Spain that standard histories barely mention the military aspect of Spanish rule.10 Militia existed, but more in name than in fact; the people were not armed. As long as Veracruz, Acapulco on the west coast, Havana, and St. Augustine could be held (or quickly retaken), and as long as a huge annual convoy could be assembled, New Spain could not be threatened in any serious way. Violence, or the threat thereof, readily controlled the native and African labor force; institutionalized armed force, however, was simply not important in New Spain before the eighteenth cen-tury.11

 

New France, in its military aspect, stands in stark contrast to New Spain. Established Spanish bases had thwarted early French efforts to colonize the more attractive southern part of the continent, and the magnificent fisheries off the Gulf of St. Lawrence, already well known to seamen of the western ports, drew the French northward. But establishing a continental base at the natural strong point of Quebec in the early seventeenth century meant securing the constricted St. Lawrence valley above Quebec, and this strategic valley proved to be the “dark and bloody ground” of Canadian history. If fish drew the French to the St. Lawrence valley, fur kept them there; but the same fur trade, pouring down from the Great Lakes and Hudson’s Bay, was also a major factor in stunting and militarizing New France.12

 

When the French and English arrived in the early seventeenth century, the native population of eastern North America, more primitive and far less numerous than the native peoples of Mexico, had felt the devastating effects of epidemic disease sweeping up from the southward. Decimated, they could resist European invasion, but not effectively. Their weakness at just the time of French and English colonization also made them susceptible to domination by the strongest Indian tribal grouping in the region, the Iroquois Confederation stretching from the Hudson valley to Niagara. In a primitive version of Aztec imperialism, the Iroquois used warfare and terror to assert hegemony over a vast tract of eastern North America, far into the best northern fur-bearing area, and into the St. Lawrence valley itself. By establishing themselves when they did in the St. Lawrence valley, the French became — as had the Spanish a century earlier — the natural allies of those Indians resisting a ruthless, aggressive Native American power. But unlike the Spanish, the French found themselves on the losing side. They could not protect their chief allies, the Hurons, from destruction by the Iroquois, and they barely could save themselves.

 

The military history of New France is grim but impressive. Not until the 1660’s, when Colbert began to pour settlers, money, and troops into the St. Lawrence, was it clear that New France would survive. Survival meant that in 1665 more than a quarter of the population, and even later as much as a tenth, were professional soldiers.13 The rest of the population was organized into militia companies, and the captains of militia were the chief officers of local administration.14 After Colbert, through heavily subsidized immigration, had brought the population up to the level needed for survival, it was left to grow naturally; the Spartan conditions of New France, described by priests and travellers and embellished with tales of Indian atrocities, did not attract settlers from Europe. The colony was essentially a huge garrison, with all the strange mixture of rowdiness and order, authority and equality, that is part of a well-run regiment. Both economics and weakness gave New France an exceptional sensitivity to relations with native Americans, and their influence with the western Indian tribes – - all of them fearful of the Iroquois – - brought Frenchmen and French outposts into the heart of the continent. And yet this military structure of New France set a fatal limit on its value to Old France.

 

The militarization of New France inhibited immigration and economic development, but it created a new weapon in French global strategy. By the eighteenth century, French ministers at Versailles saw Canada and its tough, combative people as a relatively cheap way of blocking the spectacular expansion of the Anglo-american colonies and making the British enemy divert military and naval resources from Europe, the West Indies, and India. Although some of the western posts and settlements of New France were economic liabilities, they had be-come military necessities. By mid-century, French soldiers, militiamen, and Indian auxiliaries were pressing into the Ohio valley, not to expand the fur trade, but to keep Anglo-americans penned behind the Appalachians. Despite the growing economic value of Canada within the French empire during the eighteenth century its strategic value overrode other considerations.15 Whereas peaceful coexistence with the much more numerous Anglo-americans was what New France needed in order to develop socially and economically, its essentially military function forced it to be aggressive, in the end suicidally so.

 

When New France fell, in 1760, after fighting heroically against great odds and after British naval victories had cut the lifeline to Europe, it was clear to all, including the Canadians themselves, that the government of Louis XV had simply abandoned the colony, like a broken or worn-out weapon. A century of military history, and more than a half-century of French policy, shaped the fate of New France; in 1763 it became part of the British Empire, and 65,000 militarized Canadians accepted their fate because armed resistance seemed hopeless.

 

The continental Anglo-american colonies, in their military aspect, fit neither the Spanish nor the French patterns. Tardy and feeble in the race for an American empire, England as late as the 1680’s seemed remarkably unclear in its relationship to those settlements that, by then, dotted the coast between Florida and the St. Lawrence. While certain groups of English merchants and officials were pressing for a legally defined, tightly controlled empire, the English Crown was giving away huge tracts of land and extensive powers of government in what would become New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania.16 The problem was that Anglo-america had proved to be neither a vast treasure house, like New Spain, sluicing wealth back to the mother country, nor a tough military base like New France, clearly making an important contribution to global French strategy. As in New France, the Anglo-american was armed and lived (except in Pennsylvania) under a universal obligation to perform military service. But as in New Spain, the issue of governmental control of armed force never clearly arose; for a moment, in 1685-1688, when the English Crown at-tempted drastic centralization of its colonies, the issue was almost confronted, but revolution in England resolved the crisis, and thereafter, until 1774-1775, this key question of European political development remained largely muted in the British colonies. Instead, Anglo-americans were left to govern themselves and defend themselves.17

 

The military history of the Anglo-american colonies is at best mixed, and in general unhappy. Again and again, Indians — often encouraged and supplied by New France or New Spain — would attack the Anglo-american frontier, driving settlement backward, spreading panic far beyond the point of actual attack, creating political crisis in provincial governments, and provoking efforts to retaliate massively and ruthlessly. Indian wars dragged Anglo-american provinces into or near to civil chaos more than once — Virginia in 1675-76, Massachusetts and New York in 1688-90, South Carolina in 1719-20, and Pennsylvania in 1755 and 1763-64.18 Hundreds of miles of ever-shifting frontier were not readily defensible; the only available strategy was retaliation so brutal that it would deter Indian attacks in the future, and the complete elimination of French and Spanish power from the North American continent. When the Anglo-americans could persuade government in London to help them in dealing with France and Spain, the help sent — munitions, ships, commanders, sometimes even soldiers — was usually inadequate or too late. Even along the southern frontier, where the outer defenses of New Spain seemed ever on the brink of collapse, Indians continued to seek shelter in the Spanish missions from the rapacity and cruelty of Anglo-american traders and frontiersmen.19 The policy that the numerous Anglo-americans should be able to defend themselves never worked satisfactorily; effective defense invariably seemed to demand offensive operations, which in turn were both very expensive and very difficult. Seldom could Indians be caught and punished, and expeditions against Quebec and St. Augustine foundered more than once. Only in 1745, when New Englanders caught the French defenders of Louisbourg unready, did Anglo-american military performance approximate the reiterated expectations of policy made in London.

 

The continuing failure of British military policy for the North American colonies reflected the nature of the British empire. Haphazard in its origins, it remained decentralized, dependent on local elites who could command popular support and thus govern effectively. But decentralized, popular government in the Anglo-american provinces made military coordination almost impossible. At the same time, an agricultural, naturally expansive colonial society made wars inevitable. Recurrent wars, repeated military failure with all its attendant, un-pleasant consequences — this was the dilemma that colonial officials and theorists could never resolve. 20

 

The murky, even contradictory quality of Anglo-american military policy and experience simply reflects the confusion within the government itself about the value of these continental colonies. Fish, flour, lumber, and livestock were not valuable enough to justify the cost of a colonial military establishment; tobacco saved Virginia but was hardly vital to the British economy; Carolina rice was highly profitable to the colonial planter but otherwise unimportant. Nothing produced on the continent could approach in value West Indian sugar. The chief economic value of the continental colonies lay in their land, but private persons – - not the government — profited from land sales, and the sheer attraction of cheap land created serious military problems. Settlers dispersed uncontrollably over the land, pushing the Indians into small, bloody wars that these settlers could not win without expensive help from the seaboard, in some cases from England itself. Neither treasure house nor strategic base, Anglo-america was a gigantic real estate company from which London got little except trouble.

 

And yet there were persuasive arguments on the other side. The American fisheries bred seamen essential to British naval power. American farmers and fishermen fed West Indian slaves and aggressive American merchants drained hard money out of the French and Spanish empires by selling products unneeded by Britain herself. But the strongest arguments centered on population. The spectacular growth of the Anglo-american population had, by the mid-eighteenth century, created a major market within the British Empire. A rapidly rising volume of transatlantic shipping had made the continental colonies a vital part of British sea power; about a third of the British merchant marine was American. Contemporary statistics indicate that the colonies comprised the single truly dynamic sector of the British economy on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. 21

 

When, about 1750, New France attempted to contain the powerful but militarily inefficient giant to the southward, it triggered a major policy change in London. The value of the continental colonies simply had become too great to continue with the policy of military laissez-faire. After an intense debate, London decided to send regular troops to America, at first in numbers not so large as to be unprecedented, but later in great quantity. By 1760, when New France fell, more than twenty regiments of British regulars were bearing the brunt of combat. The American colonial soldiers were, in the words of one British officer, recruited mainly “to work our boats, drive our waggons, to fell trees, and do the works that in inhabited countries are performed by peasants”.22 If, in the after-math of the decisive victories won by these British regulars and by the Royal Navy in the Seven Years War, colonial Anglo-americans felt that they had been relegated to second-class status within the British empire, it does not see m surprising; Anglo-america had become economically too valuable to have its military affairs left in the hands of the unruly, inept Anglo-americans.

 

The British decision, in the treaty of 1763, to keep Canada, the trans-Appalachian West, and Florida as a territorial buffer that would secure forever these dynamic continental colonies was of world-historical importance. Militarily, London had no choice except to garrison these great new territories with an expensive regular army. The expense of this new colonial military establishment led directly to the taxation of the colonies by Parliament, and in turn to the fierce constitutional debate and the Anglo-american resistance movement that in time produced imperial civil war. But an armed population of more than two million people three thousand miles away could not be defeated, not even by a British army and navy larger than the force that had defeated New France and New Spain in the previous war. 23

 

While the American Revolution dominates the military history of North America in the latter part of the eighteenth century, there were important consequences of 1763 for French and Spanish colonial regimes as well.

 

Of course New France had disappeared; even Louisiana was given to Spain as compensation for its wartime losses. The French population of the St. Lawrence valley, however, did not disappear. British occupation and rule were fairly benign. But the old system of local government through the militia captains did not continue. Catholics could not exercise judicial powers under the British constitution, and the militia captains retained the prestige but not the real power of their office.24 Moreover, the old regime of New France had effectively kept the seigneurial class from exercising political power, but had channeled seigneurial ambitions into the officer corps of the regular army regiments stationed in Canada; those regiments of course disappeared with the conquest in 1760.25 As British governors of Canada groped for political support in an occupied country, and especially tried to curb the powers of the tiny Protestant minority that had entered Canada in the train of the British army, they moved toward ideas eventually incorporated in the Quebec Act of 1774. Often advertised as an outstanding example of British wisdom and toleration, the Quebec Act in fact gave the Catholic hierarchy and the seigneurial class stronger positions than either had ever achieved under the French regime.26 Power shifted after the British con-quest and especially under the Quebec Act from the rural mass of the population and its natural leaders to the educated, influential minority in Montreal and Quebec.

 

A clear sign of what British military conquest and its consequences had done to the internal structure of French Canadian society was seen just a year after the Quebec Act, when Anglo-american rebel armies invaded the St. Lawrence valley. Seigneurs, priests, and French merchants rallied to the call of the British governor to arms, but the rural masses, where they were not apathetic, helped and even joined the rebels. Without active support from the habitants, Montgomery’s column would never have taken Montreal, and Arnold’s column, staggering down the Chaudiere toward Quebec, could not have survived. Despite a long history of bloody conflict between French and American settlers, men from both sides acted together in late 1775 to seize the whole valley, except for the town of Quebec itself. The ultimate failure of the Anglo-american invasion is well known; in the debacle of 1776, habitants turned against the sick, retreating rebel army, but not before the desperate Anglo-americans — unsupported from the southward — had themselves begun to pillage the Canadian peasantry. The main point, however, is that British rule, by leaning so heavily on an urbanized elite, had effectively alienated the rural mass of the population.27 The disarming of that population, the political emasculation of the militia captains, and the late, tentative steps taken to let French Canadians play again some limited military role, did nothing to alter that alienation. And we are not yet done with its consequences.

 

New Spain after 1763 has some suggestive points of similarity with the demise of New France. Havana (and Manila), like Quebec and Montreal, had fallen to British attack. The growth of population and trade during the eighteenth century, in New Spain as in New France, has been impressive. The shock of military defeat precipitated radical changes of colonial policy in both Madrid and Versailles. But whereas the French government abandoned Canada, deciding that its economic and military value could not justify the cost of retaining it, the Spanish government moved in the opposite direction. 28

 

The Spanish colonies were seen as the key to the revival and modernization of Spain itself. Accordingly a plan of imperial reform — similar to that initiated in the British Empire after 1763, but far more comprehensive — was set in motion. A major element of Spanish colonial reform was the revival of a virtually defunct colonial military establishment. Defense of the Spanish empire, in particular New Spain, against British attack or encroachment was the chief aim of military reform after 1763; Havana should be made impregnable, especially since Florida had been lost in the peace settlement, and Veracruz, Acapulco, and Campeche — the keys to Mexican trade and defense — must be equally strong. The questions, as always, were how to pay for defense, where to find the man-power, and how best to organize it. 29

 

Two schools of thought on the military reform of New Spain soon emerged. Economically, an army large enough to defend the colony would have to draw on the colonial population; regular regiments from Europe were simply too costly. Moreover, experience had shown that European regulars deteriorated quickly in the American environment; they soon lost their discipline and tactical skills, they married locally and took up non-military occupations, they sickened and died of unaccustomed diseases, they grew old, lazy, and corrupt. Although a small force of European regulars would provide garrisons and a cadre, the bulk of the new army must be found in America. But in drawing on the colonial population to create a new military structure the Spanish confronted a major difficulty. The minority known as creoles — whites born in the colonies — ever since the sixteenth century had constituted the main obstacle to effective Spanish con-trol of New Spain. Viceroy after viceroy had succumbed to opposition and seduction b y creoles entrenched in commerce, agriculture, mining, and the church. To reform New Spain demanded that somehow the powerful network of vested creole interests, including the parochial mentality that was a reflection of this network, be broken through. Creole interests and mentality were so strong that the government saw creoles as the only serious internal threat; Indians, Negroes, and other non-whites — together a vast majority of the population — were potentially dangerous but effectively controlled by the creoles themselves.30 Obviously, a new military structure required creole participation, and yet the arming and military training of creoles might be a prescription for imperial suicide. One school of thought stressed the creation of a professional army in New Spain, with creole sons given at least junior commissions, and trained and inspired by the cadre of European professionals. Creating a new class of creole military professionals would create a new mentality; obedient to orders from their supreme commander, thinking in terms of imperial security and welfare, they would out-grow the old bad habits that had made New Spain so vulnerable. The other school of thought doubted the wisdom and feasibility of superimposing a European military institution onto the complex, delicately balanced social structure of New Spain, and it emphasized the organization of an effective colonial militia which would be cheaper, would be larger, and would fit more readily into colonial society than a professional army.

 

For more than forty years after 1763 the military establishment of New Spain grew steadily. But within the steady increase of numbers there was continual oscillation between the professional and the militia concepts of military organization.31 The professional concept was confronted by the disinclination of the population to become professional soldiers. The regular officer corps of the new army was dominated by Europeans, and creoles did not want to serve under the hated peninsulares. The regular regiments thus recruited heavily from non-white dregs of society, in effect creating a small army dangerously alienated from the elite of the society it was supposed to defend. Only the militia concept could attract creoles. As militia officers they acquired a new status, especially the privilege of being exempt from civil legal jurisdiction, and there was no difficulty in inducing young creoles to accept commissions in the provincial militia regiments. Whether those regiments were effective military units, however, was another matter. Regular officers sent to inspect the militia reported that militia officers were ignorant and inattentive, that the men were poorly trained and armed, and in some cases that the organization existed only on paper. Creole eagerness to become militia officers seemed to have little connection with the defense of New Spain; the new army, despite its impressive growth, never satisfied anyone. But it effectively “militarized” a key segment of Mexican society.32

 

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 and its destruction of central authority within the Spanish empire shaped the consequences of these earlier military changes in New Spain. There had been no colonial tradition of military intervention in politics, but the inevitable contest between Spaniards and creoles for control of New Spain from 1808 onward inevitably dragged the new military establishment into the political arena. An unexpected social revolution in 1810, of Indian masses led by the enlightened creole priest Hidalgo, threw Spaniards and creoles back together. The post-1763 reforms had given the white minority the organized armed force needed to smash the Hidalgo revolt, and then to win a protracted, bloody, counterrevolutionary war against the oppressed non-white majority. But full mobilization in that war of the creole-dominated militia gave a preponderance of power to the creoles in their continuing struggle with Spaniards and Spanish authority — a struggle which the post-1763 changes had recast in a military form, with creole militia confronting Spanish professionals. A counterrevolutionary war turned creole Mexico in a conservative, militaristic direction. When Spain tried to abolish the legally privileged position of colonial militia officers in 1820, the creoles took the last step toward independence. But independence meant rejection of social reform, an emergent nation devastated by war that had begun in 1810, Spanish talent and capital driven out, and rule by armed force. By 1821, when Mexican independence was formally declared, the army had become as powerful as the church and the land-owning elite, and far less responsive to anything discernible as national interest. 33

 

Perhaps the unhappy history of Mexico would have been much the same even without the unintended, unexpected effects of post-1763 military reform. Perhaps the great majority of French Canadians would have been alienated by British rule even if conquest had not unintentionally destroyed the militarized structure of political and social organization. But the links in the chain of causation, seem very clear in each case. Less clear is the relationship between military factors and broader consequences for Anglo-america.

 

The American Revolutionary War (itself a product of imperial military re-form, and precipitated by a British decision to resolve constitutional deadlock by armed force) drove tens of thousands of Anglo-americans to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario, giving British rule in Canada the popular basis on which it would thereafter depend. This splitting of the Anglo-american population probably weakened conservative political forces in the new United States; unlike the Mexican Revolution, in which independence was won by a counter-revolutionary army, the military mobilization of Anglo-america in the fight for independence favored democratization. Raising an army meant begging or bribing common men to fight, and many loyalists became so not because they ap-proved of British policies but because they were disgusted and frightened by the corrosive effect of revolutionary war on social hierarchy and deference. The critical difference, of course, was that the United States did not have the sub-merged, non-white majority that turned revolution into counterrevolution in Mexico. Although the British, tardily and halfheartedly, tried to mobilize op-pressed groups — Negro slaves, Indians, religious and ethnic minorities — against the Anglo-american rebels, they never succeeded in transforming a colonial war into a genuine civil war between Anglo-americans.34 If they had done so, even if Britain had lost the war, the emergent United States would have been a very different sort of political and social entity.

 

Democratization — no part of the program of even the most radical leaders of Anglo-american resistance before 1775 — was only one result of protracted war. National consciousness, equally invisible before 1775, was another. Armed struggle and ultimate military victory, coupled with the rhetorical explanation of the war, gave Anglo-american independence its peculiar meaning; the aims and results of a war that could not have been won without a unified military effort were equated with the word “American”, meaning the United States. But the duration and character of the war also disconnected American nationalism from the specific institutions of central government. Central government had conspicuously failed by 1778 to sustain and control the armed struggle for independence; the latter years of the war had seen a devolution of effective government back to the provincial or state level, and respect for the Continental Congress steadily sank.35 Even the Continental Army lost prestige when it failed to defend the Southern colonies against British invasion in 1779-80, and only local guerrilla bands kept resistance alive. Had the United States split into two or three smaller republics — an outcome frequently predicted — the revolution would have been reckoned a failure; in that sense, it was an “American” Revolution. But the actual experience of revolutionary war fostered skepticism toward higher levels of government, and from this wartime experience emerged that strange bundle of compromises and contradictions known as American federalism.

 

For a moment, in 1782-83, it looked as if the American Revolution might end as so many revolutionary wars end, in a military coup. The Continental Army had gradually become less an army of citizen soldiers, and more a feeble imitation of an army of European regulars — arrogant young officers clamoring for lifetime pensions and damning the elected officials who resisted their demands, soldiers drawn by high enlistment bounties from the poorest, most obscure corners of Anglo-american society. Starved by the timidity and inefficiency-of Congress, and by the parochialism of the States, the Continental Army had learned to take what it needed. But Washington was no Caesar or Cromwell, and he simply refused to play the part assigned to him; instead, he used his own prestige to quash whatever plot existed to seize political power, and the British decision to end the war made it possible simply to dissolve the mutinous Continentals.36

 

The military problems faced in 1783 by British North America and the new United States were not unlike those of the British empire in 1763: vast spaces, thinly settled but a growing and a moving white population, and on the frontier Indians often caught between rival groups of Europeans. The chief military threat, however, recalling the century before 1763, came from the proximity of Canada and the United States to one another. British policy, like French policy before it, emphasized the strategic value of Canada in curbing the growth of power to the southward, and British expenditures kept a regular force in Canada that matched the small U.S. Army. The eventual clash, in 1812-14, was indecisive; both sides learned that they were too large and populous to be conquered by the other. Military stalemate, European powers preoccupied after 1815 with European affairs, and British naval forces in the North Atlantic left Canada and the United States to drift militarily, until internal rebellions and new technology began to change the situation, later in the century.37

 

Mexico, like Canada and the United States a territorial giant with not dissimilar problems of control and security, points the contrast with which this comparative survey may end. The military in Mexico after independence took on a life of its own, absorbing eighty percent of a swollen national budget imposed on a crippled, stagnant economy. The Mexican military gave little in return, except endless political chaos to which the army periodically pretended to bring some measure of order. So absorbed in the politics of central Mexico was this army that the government could secure the frontier province of Texas only by inviting Anglo-americans to settle there and defend it. And so corrupted by its political absorption was this army that it could not protect Mexico against invasion by smaller U.S. forces in 1846-1847.38

 

To dwell exclusively on the very different ways in which military structures and events played themselves out in these three areas of North America would be to violate the admonition with which this essay began. But in seeking some satisfactory explanation for post-colonial histories that diverged so dramatically, we gain an important degree of understanding by tracing and comparing their military histories. The remarkable unimportance of organized armed forces in the political and social life of New Spain between the brief age of con-quest and 1763 was the basic condition underlying what happened after 1763. By arming and organizing the creole population to defend New Spain, and at the same time keeping them out of the most prestigious military positions in the regular regiments, the Spanish government planted the seeds of colonial insurrection and Mexican militarism. In contrast, the remarkable extent to which New France was militarized, almost from its beginning, with military organization providing t he French regime both its most effective instrument of local government and its chief means of controlling the aristocracy of the colony, was a critical factor in the history of Canada after 1760. Projecting a false, anglicized picture of elite rule on to the strange society of the St. Lawrence valley, the new British regime abruptly shifted the balance of power within the French population, leaving the habitants alienated and apathetic. To the southward, a constantly expanding, aggressive population of farmers, the colonial Anglo-Americans were both heavily armed and terribly vulnerable. When the British government eventually found the cost of their wars becoming intolerable, and the value of their production and consumption indispensable, London ordered British regulars to take over the task of policing the Anglo-American colonies. The fiscal and constitutional ramifications of that change led to civil war, a war which the presence of regulars in North America encouraged London to begin, but a war that Britain, confronted by a numerous, armed people, simply could not win. Although the collapse of British imperial greatness was the predicted result, the actual result was the anglicization of the Canadian population.

 

The clear lesson of these three stories is that military arrangements represent vital allocations of power and interest, however invisible or unimportant those arrangements may seem in the day-today life of a society. The politicians and reformers who altered these arrangements in the eighteenth century seem to reflect an assumption fashionable in our own age, that armed force is best seen as an instrument of political action, a manageable means to a rational end. But the results of imperial military change in the eighteenth century went so far be-yond the terms of the basic assumption, so far beyond anything foreseen or de-sired by those who initiated the changes, that the assumption itself comes into question. Whether this question still arises, or whether the revolutions that separate the early modern world from the late twentieth century have resolved it, is a matter beyond the scope of this essay.

 

Notes

1) What follows is based primarily on my own research for colonial Anglo-america and the United States, but draws heavily from the published work of W.J. Eccles for New France, Christon I. Archer, Lyle N. McAlister, and Charles Gibson for New Spain, C.P. Stacey for Canada, and John Lynch and Charles C. Cumberland for Mexico.

2) Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York, 1966), 63.

3) T.D. Stewart, The People of America (New York, 1973), 1-70, offers an up-to-date synthesis of knowledge about the pre-columbian population of America.

4) Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago, 1959), is a brilliant recrea-tion of Indian history before and after the Spanish invasion.

5) Gibson, 26, et passim.

6) Ibid., 35.

7) Stewart, 25-28; Gibson, 3-65.

8) Gibson, 143-147.

9) Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760-1810 (Albuquerque, 1977), 1-3. A fuller, more systematic account is in Maria del Carmen Velasquez, El Estado de Guerra en Nueva Espana, 1760-1808 (Mexico City, 1950), 9-29. On the northern frontier, see Gibson, 182-192, and the fuller treatments in Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians, and Silver (Berkeley, 1952) and John TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida, 1700-1763 (Durham, North Carolina, 1964), 3-7, 193-226.

10) E.g., Gibson.

11) Jonathan I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico , 1610-1670, especially his remark on page 269 about the “almost total lack of arms” in the ruling white population.

12) What follows derives mainly from W.J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534-1760 (New York, 1969), and France in America (New York, 1972).

13) Eccles, Frontier, 101.

14) W.J. Eccles, “The Social, Economic, and Political Significance of the Military Establishment in New France”, Canadian Historical Review, LII (1971), 1-22.

15) On the impressive growth of the economy of New France, see Maurice Filion, La pensée et l’action coloniales de Maurepas vis-à-vis du Canada, 1723-1749 (Ottawa, 1972).

16) Wesley Frank Craven, The Colonies in Transition (New York, 1968), 1-103.

17) John Shy, Toward Lexington (Princeton, 1965), 3-44.

18) Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1957), Michael G. Hall, et al. (eds.), The Glorious Revolution in America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1964), and James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1746-1770 (Princeton, 1972).

19) TePaske, 108-158, 193-226.

20) The early volumes of Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution (New York, 1936-1970), 15 vols., provide the fullest account of these problems in the mid-eighteenth century.

21) Phyllis Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959 (Cambridge, 1962), 40-97, and James Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972).

22) Col. James Robertson to John Calcraft, 22 June 1760 (extract), Loudoun MSS. LO 6251, Henry E. Huntington Library.

23) Shy, Toward Lexington, and A People Numerous and Armed (New York, 1976).

24) A.L. Burt, The Old Province of Quebec (Minneapolis, 1933), 2835, 92.

Frederick B. Wiener, Civilians Under Military Justice (Chicago, 1967), 37-63, contains useful details of civilians tried in Canada by “court martial” between 1759 and 1764, when military government ended, but be-cause the author is preoccupied with British practice the vital distinction between British military courts and French militia captains is obscured; see especially pp. 39-40.

25) Eccles, “Military Establishment,” 17.

26) Burt, passim.

27) John E. Hare, “Le comportement de la paysannerie rurale et urbaine de la région de Québec pendant l’occupation américaine 1775-1776″, University of Ottawa Review, XLVII (1977), 145-150. This succinct article is based heavily on the investigation of the Quebec district parishes, published in the Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec for 1927-1928 (Québec, 1928), 431-499, which is amply confirmed by evidence from the rebel side.

28) Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (New York, 1970), 86-106.

29) This account is based on Archer, and on Lyle N. McAlister, “The Reorganization of the Army of New Spain, 1763-1766,” Hispanic American Historical Review, XXXIII (1953), 1-32, and The “Fuero Militar” in New Spain (Gainesville, Florida, 1957).

30) Israel, 136-269, tells the story for the seventeenth century.

31) Archer tells this story in detail.

32) McAlister, “Fuero Militar”, 1-15. John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, 1964), 13-23, stresses the wars of independence in creating “militarism”.

33) This version of Mexican history from 1810 follows John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (New York, 1973), 294-330.

34) William Nelson, The American Tory (New York, 1959); Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 183-224, and “British Strategy for Pacifying the Southern Colonies, 1778-1781″, The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, J.J. Crow and L.E. Tise (eds.) (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1978), 155-173.

35) E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961),3-69, traces the devolutionary process for the critical issue — public finance.

36) Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword (New York, 1975), deals most fully with the military establishment that emerged from the Revolution. On the Newburg “conspiracy” of 1782-1783, various interpretations are argued in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XXVII (1970), 187-220, XXIX (1972), 143-158, and XXXI (1974), 273-298.

37) C.P. Stacey, Canada and the British Army, 1846-1871 (Toronto, rev.ed., 1963), 1-45; Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 (New York, 1969); Gerald S. Graham, Empire of the North Atlantic (London, 2nd ed., 1958). Also con-taining useful information and documents is A History of the … Military and Naval Forces of Canada from the Peace of Paris in 1763, especially vols. I-II (Ottawa, 1919-20).

38) Charles C. Cumberland, Mexico, The Struggle for Modernity (New York, 1968), 141-189.