While independence was declared in 1776, it was achieved by agreement in 1783. With the Treaty of Paris officially ending the Revolutionary War, history hardened into myth. The ride of Paul Revere. The British are coming; the British are coming. One if by land, two if by sea. An American commander telling his men: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Minutemen along the road to Lexington, emerging from the trees to fire at columns of marching Redcoats, only to disappear back into the forest.
The patriotic lore developed in the aftermath of the American Revolution sprang from the document that concluded it as much as the declaration that announced it. The 1783 treaty had two signatories, Great Britain and the United States. It defined the boundaries between those British colonies that remained loyal and those that rebelled. The framing suggests a concord between two belligerents, with relatively local impacts.
In fact, the War for Independence embroiled at least half-a-dozen nations. It tore more than British North America asunder.
In the Northwestern borderlands, the Iroquois federation had maintained a mutual defence pact with Britain for roughly a century. While the Tuscarora sided with the colonists, the Seneca decided to stand by England. America’s peace with Britain meant an intensification of war for them. George Washington dispatched the Continental Army to wage a merciless and savage campaign of extermination, driving many of the Seneca over the new border with Canada.
In the Gulf South borderlands, the Creek and Choctaw nations had been victim to the predations of Carolina slavers, with raids on their towns and the trafficking of their kinsmen emerging as a cruel feature of life in the eighteenth century. They had little collective interest in an American victory. But because of the decentralised political structures of Mississippian Indigenous societies, there was not a perfect consensus on whom to aid.
The American Revolution was global in its scope and consequences.
Further south, Spain scrambled to extend and fortify its norther frontier, attacking the West Florida British garrison town by sea at Pensacola Bay.
France found a strategic ally in the revolutionary government of the United States, with the French military commander Marquis de Lafayette barracking for the colonists in Paris, field commanding a key victory at Yorktown, Virgina in 1781 and then going on to take part in the French Revolution eight years later.
In short, the American Revolution was global in its scope and consequences. The war would remake the map of the world, including the great southern land that would become Australia. When we consider the conclusion of hostilities by treaty in 1783, the legal outcome of the declaration of 1776, a telling continuity emerges. The arrival of the first fleet from London to the shores of Port Jackson comes only five years after its signing. Transportation to Botany Bay followed from the treason at Bunker Hill. If the architects of British empire had allowed too many English liberties among the populus seaboard of North America, what better insurance against rebellion than a prison colony.
But there are deeper and more foundational continuities between the founding documents of the United States and the founding of British Australia.
there are deeper and more foundational continuities between the founding documents of the United States and the founding of British Australia.
Perhaps one of the most famous phrases of the Declaration of Independence is that all men possess certain inalienable rights, among them the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Students of intellectual history will recognise Thomas Jefferson’s allusion to John Locke’s treatises on government, wherein he states that governments should be formed to secure “life, liberty and property.” Property, or, to put it more prosaically: land.
In the English tradition of colonisation, land plus labour equals property. Spain possessed by decree, the Dutch by mapping, the British by cultivation. If the land was unworked, it was terra nullius, the Latin phrase that Australians would eventually invoke to justify dispossession and settlement.
One of the first-ever PhD theses in American Studies at Harvard University was called “Virgin Land,” a highly sexualised metaphor of conquest. It argued that the key driver in the American Revolution was not the need for more liberty, or fewer taxes, or a better representative government, but the sheer fact of the land, the avaricious drive to have it.
In both America and in Australia, British settlement proceeded by denying or ignoring that prior inhabitation by Indigenous people amounted to an agricultural civilisation. Violence there begat violence here. In the British Museum there is a shield purported to have been taken by James Cook from Botany Bay, with what looks like a bullet hole. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the opening skirmish of the American Revolution: a shot heard ‘round the world'.
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