PRELIMINARIES SIGNED AT VERSAILLES 781 Vergennes secured the acceptance of these terms. It was further agreed that a commission should be appointed to consider commercial questions. Preliminaries of peace were signed at Versailles between Great Britain and France and Spain on 20 January 1783. As to the fishery, Vergennes had fought hard to retain the word exclusive, but in the end was obliged to be content with the conditions outlined above. St Pierre and Miquelon and St Lucia and Tobago were ceded to the French, who were confirmed in the right of fishing in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Grenada and the Grenadines, St Vincent, Dominica, St Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat were restored to Great Britain, whose possession of Fort James and the River Gambia was confirmed. Senegal and its dependencies and Goree were restored to France. In India, Great Britain restored all the establishments belonging to France at the commencement of the war on the coast of Orissa and in Bengal, with a liberty to surround Chandernagore with a ditch for draining; also Pondicherry and Karikal and their dependencies, and Mahé and the comptoir at Surat. A safe, free and independent trade was guaranteed to the French in those parts of India. All articles relative to Dunkirk were abrogated. Spain obtained Minorca and the two Floridas, and restored Providence and the Bahama Islands and all other captured British possessions. British subjects were to be allowed to cut logwood in a district of which the boundaries were to be fixed. Commissioners were to be appointed to discuss a commercial treaty. At the same time, a truce was made with Holland. Dutch plenipotentiaries had come to Paris in October and insisted upon the recognition of the Armed Neutrality as a preliminary to peace in accordance with Fox's former communication, but were told that that offer had been cancelled by their rejection of the overture for peace which accompanied it. They also demanded restitution of all the British conquests, and compensation for captured vessels.1 These demands were refused.2 The States-General were offered instead a renewal of the treaties in being before the rupture, and the return of all places taken from them except Trincomalee. Finally, on 20 May 1784, a definitive treaty was settled on the basis of mutual restitution, except that Great Britain retained Negapatam, the most important harbour on the Coromandel coast.3 But one very important concession the Dutch were compelled to make as the price of the dilatory diplomacy which had left them alone upon the field. By Article vi of the treaty the States-General agreed, most unwillingly, not to obstruct British navigation of the Eastern Seas. The Dutch had hitherto endeavoured to maintain an exclusive trade 1 Fitzherbert to Grantham, 28 Oct. 1782. 2 Grantham to Fitzherbert, 18, 20 Dec. 1782. Koch et Schöll, Traités (1817 edn), ш, 400–3; Martens, Recueil des traités, 11, 457, 462, 520. in the Far East. The surrender of this monopoly, opening up as it did unrestricted commerce with the Spice Islands and China, was a gain of immense value to Great Britain. Shelburne attached the most importance to the clauses which related, as he expressed it, "to the great principle of free trade which inspired the treaties from beginning to end". But the negotiations of the commercial treaties passed into other hands. Parliament had been prorogued till 5 December in the hope that the signing of preliminary articles with France and Spain as well as America might be announced. The position of Shelburne had by this time become very insecure. He was the most able statesman in England, but his personal following was small. The measures of parliamentary reform which he advocated and the curtailment of the Civil List which he introduced brought their inevitable reward of reaction and of hostility from placemen deposed. Moreover, he was endeavouring, like Chatham, to govern without party and with an administration "on a broad bottom", and, like Chatham, found that in a crisis every man was for himself. Virulent denunciations of the Preliminaries by Fox and Burke were convincingly answered by Pitt and Shelburne, who revealed the strain to which the Navy and the country's finances had been put. But by an unfortunate indiscretion Shelburne in the House of Lords added to the distrust with which he was regarded by declaring that the grant of independence was not irrevocable, whilst Pitt in the Commons admitted that it was. The country, smarting from a peace that no man could have made pleasing, sought a scapegoat. Resignations from the Cabinet opened the way to what Pitt denounced as "the unprincipled Coalition", and to the alliance of North, who had carried on the war against his personal convictions, with Fox, who six months before had described him as worthy of impeachment. Shelburne resigned on 24 February 1783. The negotiation of a treaty of commerce passed then into the hands of Fox. But his emissary, David Hartley, having exceeded his instructions and forfeited the confidence of the American commissioners, it remained only to sign the three definitive treaties in the terms of the Preliminaries (3 September 1783). The Peace of Paris and Versailles brought to a close the long struggle which ever since 1740 had been maintained with France for the New World. By it France achieved her revenge for the disaster of 1763. Helped by the blunders of her age-long rival, she had called "a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old". Whether the secession of the thirteen colonies was a good thing for them or a bad thing for Great Britain are questions upon which historians have differed. But the subsequent development of the United States has an inspiring lesson to offer to the second British 1 Shelburne to Morellet, 13 March 1783. 2 Gibbon, E., to Holroyd, 14 Oct. 1782. IMPERIAL EXAMPLE OF THE UNITED STATES 783 Empire which has grown up since that event. By its progress, its adhesiveness, its solidarity, the Union of American States has demonstrated that an empire need not necessarily fall to pieces when it has become great. It has by its growth shown that Turgot's dictum, which its birth seemed to prove, is not necessarily true; that colonies need not fall off when ripe, but that an indefinite number of States may be held together in a union which has not the radical defects of the old colonial system. IN CHAPTER XXVI THE LITERATURE AND SOCIAL LIFE OF THE OLD EMPIRE previous chapters the political developments that followed from the settlement of English colonies in North America have been dealt with. It remains to say something of the social and intellectual conditions of this new world. At the outset it is necessary to emphasise that during the whole colonial period we find little or no trace of the beginnings of a distinctly national type in the field of either social or intellectual relations. Different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and in some of the colonies different religious persuasions and different manners, did not make for national unity. Indeed, their jealousy of each other was so great that, however necessary a union of the colonies had been for their common defence, yet they were never able to effect such a union among themselves, nor even to agree in requesting the mother country to establish it for them. During the years in question the western States were still unborn and the types of colony with which we have to deal divide themselves into three distinct groups: the southern, the northern and the middle. With Virginia must be associated Maryland which was carved out of it, the Carolinas and Georgia. The New England colonies, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island were as different in character from the southern colonies as were their respective vegetations. Lastly, the middle colonies, New York, with its satellite New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, with its satellite Delaware, afforded a half-way house in which the extremes of north and south might to some extent blend owing to the power of foreign influences. Later on we shall have something to say of the cosmopolitan character of New York and of the manner in which German immigration affected the nature of Penn's experiment. It is enough here to note that, however New York and Pennsylvania may have differed in character, they had still points in common unknown to the type of northern or southern colonist. To Virginia, the eldest of the colonies, the mother of the future creators of the American nation, George Washington, Jefferson and Madison, must be given the pride of place in any discussion of American conditions. What, then, was the social and intellectual life of the Virginia of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? A distinguished Virginian historian1 who devoted many years to the study of the institutional, economic and social conditions of his native country in the seventeenth century, has insisted with much 1 Bruce, P. A., The Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. VIRGINIA AS AN ARISTOCRATIC SOCIETY 785 power on the degree in which the Virginia of the time was a replica of old England; and though subsequent research seems to show that the predominance of an aristocracy was not so great as he suggested, and that the purchase of land by men who had served their time as indentured labourers played a more important part in the development of the colony than was reckoned by him, still the general conclusion may be accepted; whilst nothing can be more misleading than the statement of a brilliant English historian that Virginia was mainly peopled by members of the criminal classes. There were, indeed, strong reasons why younger members of eminent English families should seek a new home in Virginia. Under the rule of the Parliament and Cromwell prospects at home were very black for men of this class. As was said by one of them, Virginia (he might have added Barbados) was "the only city of refuge left in His Majesty's dominions in those times for distressed cavaliers".1 Such men naturally gravitated towards each other. They had, in common, loyalty to the monarchy whose eclipse they regarded as only temporary. Further, the cultivation of tobacco afforded opportunities for the English system of fairly large estates, indentured labourers taking the place of the English farm hands. Lastly, for those seriously inclined, there was the attraction of a State Church modelled more or less-(we shall see how different it proved in its working)— on the Church of England. In this state of things it is small wonder that the historian can point with pride to the number of distinguished English families that had their representatives in Virginia. The absence of towns, which afterwards played no little part in the retardation of Virginia's economic development, appeared as an additional attraction to men whose interests were centred in rural pursuits. A remarkable feature in seventeenth-century Virginia, and one which especially appealed to members of the governing classes in England, was the way in which, as in none other of the British colonies, old-world usages and distinctions were able to transplant themselves into the virgin soil of a new continent. Social divisions remained as strong as they had been in England. The size of some of the estates was very great, the Fairfax estate in Virginia embracing at one time 6,000,000 acres. There was naturally less variety of classes. There were no noblemen or bishops, and the mercantile element scarcely existed. The community consisted almost exclusively of gentlemen, yeomen and labourers; but there was at least as broad a line of demarcation between these classes as in England. The titles "Esquire", "Mr" and "Gentleman" conveyed definite meanings and were not applied loosely. The right of bearing arms was jealously prized and any unwarranted assumption of such right would have been immediately resented. Nevertheless, from the first, tendencies were at work which in the end brought it about that aristocratic Virginia 1 Force, P., Hist. Tracts, 1, 34, “Ingram's Proceedings". CHBE I 50 |