Right now, we’re putting the finishing touches on the high school version of our Courage, New Hampshire curriculum supplement, and Megan Ernst and I are debating causes of the Revolution.   Certainly there are quite a few threads to tie together in weaving the causal tapestry — English common law, the Reformation, the Great Awakening, the Black (Presbyterian) Regiment, the Enlightenment, the constraints of the Intolerable Acts, the Quebec Act,  the various revenue acts, and all of that jazz, but I wonder if anyone has ever done a study of what might be called imperial arrogance.

How much of the Revolution can be blamed on just the puffy-faced pride of our British overlords?

Yesterday my friend Mike Lewis found a book called Travels through the Middle Settlement in North-Ameria in the years 1759 and and 1760 by the Rev. Andrew Burnaby.    The author was the Vicar of Greenwich and shortly after he arrived in Virginia he began filling his journal with paint-peeling condemnations of his colonial hosts:

Just a few here at random:

“…it will not be difficult to form an idea of the character of [Virginia’s] inhabitants.   The climate and external appearance of the country conspire to make them indolent, easy… and much given to convivial pleasures.  In consequence of this, they seldom show any spirit of enterprise, or expose themselves willingly to fatigue..”

“..it is not extraordinary, therefore, that the Virginians out-run their incomes..”

“..The women are, upon the whole, rather handsome, though not to be compared with our fair country-women in England.  They have but few advantages, and consequently are seldom accomplished; They are immoderately fond of dancing, and indeed it is almost the only amusement they partake of; but even in this they discover great want of taste and elegance..”

Instead of 18th century Virginians, substitute the religious or ethnic minority of your choice in those paragraphs and see how they strike you.  Some years ago, when Mel Gibson was getting lambasted for the movie “The Patriot,” I wrote this article setting the record straight.  Our colonial ancestors didn’t take up arms because they were having a bad hair day, and, as one of our employees once put it — we didn’t get a country by asking nicely.   A brutal war was fought against a brutal enemy, with cause.

One of those causes must have had something to do with the sort of arrogance Reverend Burnaby displayed (or at least internalized) in his journal.   Whether it was Lord Rawdon thinking the rape of American women was good fodder for comedy or Major Pitcairn thinking a few New England villages needed to be burned, this attitude must have displayed itself in thousands of conversations and administrative actions during the years prior to the war. 

In fairness to Burnaby, you sense him softening up towards his American cousins as he travels and you have to give him credit for championing the cause of American slaves, but the preconception, and the unadressed prejudice is worth considering.   He very well may have represented a prejudice that was general among his fellow countrymen.

And you know what they say about pride.   Sometimes it goes before a fall and sometimes it goes before a revolution.